Revised "Tiered Election Audits" paper for Layman

Revised "Tiered Election Audits" paper for the Layman

Here is a newly revised "Tiered Election Audits" paper for the lay person.

http://electionarchive.org/ucvAnalysis/US/paper-audits/FourTierAudit/TieredElectionAudits.pdf

Please Act Now to Protect U.S. Democracy and Ensure Election Outcome Integrity

If the goal of elections is to ensure the will of the voters, then the goal of election audits is to ensure that voters determine who represents them. It seems simple. However, the US Congress may be planning election audits that are not designed to ensure that voters always determine election outcomes!

According to analysis by Kathy Dopp, President of National Election Data Archive,

"If Congress specifies a fixed rate manual election audit of 2%, with a minimum audit of 6 vote counts, that would give only a 56% chance for detecting when election outcomes are inaccurate in races with 5% margins between leading candidates; and would give under a 50% chance of detecting when election outcomes were inaccurate in races with 4.2% or less margins between candidates."

We have a choice: To achieve fair elections now, or to put it off for another election cycle and hope that we have another opportunity to achieve fair elections.

To ensure that voters' will determines election outcomes, we need election audits that are designed to achieve that goal.

People may contact their US Senators and House Representative and Representative Rush Holt D-NJ at

http://house.gov (put in your zip code) http://senate.gov

to ask them to please read the "Tiered Election Audit", newly revised for the lay person:

http://electionarchive.org/ucvAnalysis/US/paper-audits/FourTierAudit/TieredElectionAudits.pdf

To ensure the future of our democracy that so many Americans previously fought and died for, it is necessary to subject elections to mathematically sufficient independent manual audits - especially close elections.

Congressman Rush Holt D-NJ may be considering the same requirement for a 2% flat rate audit that was in his former HR550. Holt's new election integrity legislation is due to be released to the House floor this week after which it could become difficult to alter its audit provisions.

A "tiered" election audit specifies audit percentages in a small table along with minimum numbers of vote counts that must be manually audited to ensure correct outcomes, according to specific margins between candidates, as seen in the initial election results. The closer a race, the more vote counts must manually counted to find a small amount of miscount that could wrongly alter the outcome.

A tiered election audit is a good compromise between audits which simply require that "large enough size samples of vote counts are manually counted to ensure 99% scientific certainty that the election outcomes are correct" but which must be calculated individually for each race; and audits which simply require that a flat rate of "2% of all vote counts are manually counted" but are insufficient to ensure the integrity of election outcomes in all cases.

A tiered audit requires that a minimum "amount" of vote counts be manually audited for any particular margin to prevent audits from being subverted by aggregating ballots into a small number of larger-size vote counts which could cause a flat percentage audit to be ineffective. These required minimums sometimes will result in 100% hand counts of 100% of vote counts whenever it is necessary to ensure election outcome integrity.

Today's utterly flawed electronic voting systems provide no means to determine who did what and when on a voting machine after an election, so any fraudster knows that he will never be caught. A flat 2% audit would announce to a vote fraudster exactly how and when fraud be most likely to succeed in rigging an election.

Dopp encourages all election officials, election integrity activists, and U.S. Senators and Representatives who are concerned about election integrity to read "Tiered Election Audits" and to implement its recommendations:

http://electionarchive.org/ucvAnalysis/US/paper-audits/FourTierAudit/TieredElectionAudits.pdf

To achieve the necessary effective public oversight over manual audits of elections, audits must be independent, verifiable, transparent, scientific, and used to detect and correct any errors found in initial election results that might wrongly put a candidate into office that was not selected by voters.

http://www.house.gov/ http://senate.gov/general/contact_information/senators_cfm.cfm

The possible consequences could be dire if the US Congress leaves U.S. elections wide-open to vote fraud and innocent miscount in the upcoming 2008 elections by failing to require sufficient auditing elections.

Please help us ensure the future by taking action now.

Kathy Dopp
http://electionarchive.org
National Election Data Archive
Dedicated to Accurately Counting Elections

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