White Paper: Consideration of Ohio Audits in 2008

Tuesday, 19 February 2008 00:00

CASE Ohio Reports

By Ohio Joint Audit Working Group (working with CASE Ohio)

From Executive Summary

• Properly conducted post-election audits can ensure that miscounts are corrected before certification.
• Fixed and Tiered audits tend to count too few votes in close races and too many votes on races that are not close.
• The recommended Statistical audit method provides a way to achieve a high level of confidence in the results at a minimum cost.
• A statewide post-election audit after the November 2004 election that followed the recommendations in this paper would have cost an estimated $165,000.
• A statewide post-election audit after the November 2006 election (with its additional statewide races) that followed the recommendations in this paper would have cost an estimated $260,000.
• Limiting the number of races to audit is recommended for the 2008 election and is estimated to cost less than $100,000.

Purpose of This White Paper

This White Paper was prepared to assist the Secretary of State, Ohio Election Officials, and Legislators as they consider legislative action in 2008 to institute post-election audit procedures.   This paper provides background information and detailed recommendations on the different audit methods and how they might be used in Ohio.

This paper was written after a request from Secretary of State Brunner’s Voting Rights Institute (VRI) on January 15th for information on audits. The Joint Audit Working Group that wrote the paper includes members of theVRI’s Advisory Council with input from statisticians and election integrity experts. Opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this paper are the responsibility solely of the authors and not a statement of the VRI or Secretary of State's office.

The purpose of post-election audits is to identify problems, to make it possible to correct them for the current election, and to make suggestions with the final audit report for future improvements. We all need to help educate the public and media that elections are complicated, some mistakes are inevitable, and an audit that finds and corrects problems should be regarded as a success.

The first few sections in the paper provide general background

• Background on Ohio
• Concern about Voting Systems
• What is a Post-election Audit?
• Interest in Post-election Audits
• Model Post-election Audit Provisions

The next sections present our recommendations for implementing audits

• Recommendations
• Cost Estimates
• Audits in 2008
• Further Study
• Conclusion
• Acknowledgments

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