Bowen proposes improvements in CA election audits. (Sorry, still just 1%)

BOWEN MEASURE TO IMPROVE AND OPEN UP
CALIFORNIA’S ELECTION AUDIT PROCESS HEADS TO GOVERNOR


SACRAMENTO – Closing a loophole in California’s election auditing procedures and opening the entire process to the public are the goals of SB 1235 by Senator Debra Bowen (D-Redondo Beach), the chairwoman of the Senate Elections, Reapportionment & Constitutional Amendments Committee, which cleared the full Senate today on a bipartisan 40-0 vote and now heads to the Governor’s desk.

“Nearly half of California’s voters use an absentee ballot to vote and thousands of others take advantage of in-person early voting opportunities before every election, so the fact that some counties don’t include nearly half of the ballots cast in any given election in the auditing process undermines the integrity of the audit and the election itself,” said Bowen. “The 1% manual audit is designed to ensure the electronic voting machines and the ballot counters tallied the results correctly, but there’s no way to conduct a meaningful review if more than half of the ballots cast aren’t subject to the 1% audit requirement.”

Under California law, elections officials are required to conduct a public manual tally of the ballots cast in at least 1% of the precincts to check the accuracy of the votes tabulated by the electronic or mechanical voting systems. The law also requires the precincts subject to the audit to be randomly selected by elections officials, but it doesn’t define “random.”

SB 1235 (Bowen) improves the election auditing procedures in four significant ways by:

* Requiring elections officials to include absentee, provisional, and all other ballots that are cast before Election Day or at satellite voting centers in the 1% audit;

* Ensuring the precincts subject to the manual audit requirement will truly be randomly selected by requiring elections officials to use a random number generator to select the precincts to be manually counted;

* Requiring a five-day public notice to be given before the precincts to be audited are selected and before the audit itself will be done, and ensuring both events are open to the public; and

* Requiring the results of the audit to be made public, complete with an explanation of how discrepancies between the machine count and the hand count were resolved.

“At a time when the public’s confidence in our electoral system is dropping and 92% of those asked in a recent survey said voters should have a right to watch ballots being counted, improving and opening up the auditing process to ensure the accuracy and integrity of our elections only makes sense,” continued Bowen. “The mandatory manual audit law was created forty years ago when fewer than 4% of the state’s voters used an absentee ballot. Now, more than 30% of California’s nearly 16 million voters are registered as permanent absentee voters, 47% of the people who voted in the June primary election did so by absentee ballot, and it won’t be long before a majority of the state’s voters are mailing in their ballots from home.”

SB 1235 is a follow-up to last year’s SB 370 (Bowen), which requires elections officials to use the paper produced by the accessible voter-verified paper audit trail (AVVPAT) on all electronic voting machines to conduct the 1% manual audit and to use the AVVPAT in the event of a recount.

The Governor has until September 30th to sign, veto, or allow SB 1235 to become law without his signature.