Carbon to begin hand count audit of election results
A ballot lies on top of the new voting scanner that Carbon County voters will use on Tuesday. AMY MILLER/TIMES NEWS
The votes may have been cast in Tuesday’s general election, but questions remain for many Carbon County candidates, officials and voters after an error in the vote tallying system Tuesday night caused significant problem with the final vote tallies that were sent out.
On Friday, a number of candidates in various races spoke out at the Carbon County Election Board’s meeting to begin the official canvassing that will allow the county to certify the vote.
At the end of the meeting, the board unanimously voted to do a complete hand count audit, meaning the county will look at each paper ballot to do another tabulation of all votes cast; as well as have Dominion Voting, the company the county purchased the new paper ballot voting systems from, bring in a high speed scanner to also rescan all ballots to verify that the process isn’t flawed.
The county is now tasked with finding employees who will volunteer to help in the hand count, which has 20 days to be completed before votes must be certified
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Comments
Privacy, security and redundancy were in question.
Canvassing (checking of ballots) will be done on 100% of the ballots, with a hand counts and a high-speed rescan of all the ballots. Bravo to the Carbon Election Board for doing the right thing in getting accurate counts.
Legally, this should have already started today, Friday morning, at 9 am. However, the County is in a bit of an uproar over the massive amount of errors. A packed house filled the Election Office this morning. The errors that were shared would best be called by the computer generation as a bug, or programming error. However, the older fellows called it a glitch, as if it was an anomoly, or unpredicted mechanical failure of a single voting machine. This failure appears to be systemic.
The standard checks and balances in the system were apparently missed with the vendor of the machines taking the role as leader. The public officials admitted to having little to no knowledge of the programming process, or verification of said software programs, proving their blind trust to the vendor.
Restored trust in election results should follow the 100% manual and re-scan process. At the end of this ballot review, the ability to hold a smooth election should be restored.
It is very obvious, these errors were merely a function of actions that were taken, and not taken in opposition to common accepted practices. The process to ensure privacy, security and redundancy appear to have failed on this first run with the new machines.
Sincerely,
Citizen David F. Bradley Sr
"...The county is now tasked with finding employees who will volunteer to help in the hand count....."
I am not pleased to hear county employees, who may have a political bias, are being used for the recount.
I suppose there is no choice; but it should be done in pairs, one from each party.