US Election Assistance Commission - Voluntary Voting System Guidelines Vote
EAC Home
Introduction
View Guidelines
View Comments
Glossary

View Comments

Section CommentsGeneral CommentsGlossary Comments
 
Name :   Sherry Healy
Organization :   CALIFORNIA ELECTION PROTECTION NETWORK
Post Date :   9/30/2005

Section Comments
Section :  6.8
Page no. :  36
Line no.:  9
Comment :  The CALIFORNIA ELECTION PROTECTION NETWORK, a non-partisan organization of over 25 groups coming together to achieve their mutual election integrity goals has voted as follows:

In honor of all those who have given their lives in the name of democracy, we respectfully request that Section 6.8 be amended to require the following:

Gold Standard Audit Protocol
All state elections shall have (at the State’s expense):

• PAPER BALLOTS: Accessible, voter-verifiable, paper ballots, meeting at least the following minimum specifications: paper ballots printed with 14 pt. type using individual 8.5 x 11 20 lb. archival paper stock (which shall be kept for at least 5 years as proof of the election result).  

• HAND COUNTS: A manual audit which relies on human eyes.

• STATISTICALLY SIGNIFICANT SAMPLING: Select a minimum of 5% of all precincts (and precincts cannot exceed 1000 voters). Within these selected precincts, audit 100% of the paper ballots; or in their absence, the paper trails.  

• GENUINELY RANDOM: Genuinely random selected samples (not at the discretion of election officials).

• PUBLIC OVERSIGHT:  Each political participating political party may form delegations to witness every step of the election process. Results of each tally posted publicly on a public-accessible posting at the precinct site, as well as on a public-accessible portion of the Secretary of State’s web site in a comma-delimited format (e.g. a format that may easily be extracted into a word processing or spreadsheet software), BEFORE the data is transferred from the precinct (e.g. to the county’s central tabulator).

• RECOURSE: Any discrepancies between the machine tally and the audit Gold Standard audit protocol shall require the State to repeat this Gold Standard Audit protocol; however, each time the sample size shall increase by 10%.  The final result of this audit process supersedes the finding of the initial tally and is binding.
Attach file :  CEPN_GoldStandard.pdf