Revised "Tiered Election Audits" paper for the Layman
Here is a newly revised "Tiered Election Audits" paper for the lay person.
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:
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:
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.
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
National Election Data Archive
Dedicated to Accurately Counting Elections