Posted by Karen McKim · November 25, 2018 10:31 PM
No city treasurer would refuse to check the accuracy of property-tax bills.
No county executive would release a report on annual expenditures without double-checking its accuracy.
Most local officials don’t need anyone to pass a law telling them to check their work. They accept that as a basic managerial responsibility.
But the Wisconsin County Clerks Association is officially on record: They don’t want to.
And their work product is our election results.
The WCCA statement came in response to the Wisconsin Elections Commission’s September announcement that they were considering two election-security measures.
The Commission’s first proposal involved the only accuracy-checks the Commission has authority to order: audits of individual voting machines by municipal (not county) clerks. These audits are better than nothing,
The Commission was considering ordering more machines audited than in previous years and requiring the audits to be completed before election results are declared final.
The Commission’s second proposal would move Wisconsin slightly in the direction of national election-security standards. The Commission was considering encouraging county clerks to perform audits of the type that if done widely, might confirm that Election-Night results had identified the right winner and enable clerks to correct the results if they had not.
WCCA’s response was swift, naïve, and irresponsible. The county clerks didn’t want the Commission to require, or even encourage, the county clerks to perform genuine election audits.
Perhaps sensing they are defending the losing side in a national trend (they are), the county clerks also described how they want to restrict this election safeguard:
- They don’t wanna check accuracy until after they have certified final election results.
- They don’t wanna check accuracy for any but the top race on the ballot.
- And they want the State to pay extra if it even suggests they check accuracy.
I’m not making that up. The organization’s memo to the Wisconsin Elections Commission is reproduced, verbatim, below.
About delaying audits until after certification: The WCCA wrote that our paper ballots “should be treated
About auditing only the top race on the ballot: The WCCA wants to audit only the top race on the ballot, ever. This could be restated: “If you force us to protect the US Senate election, we will refuse to protect the Governor’s race.” Hackers are delighted to know ahead of time which races will be protected, and which will be on an honor system.
About making the state pay extra for accuracy: The WCCA clearly rejected the idea that accuracy is a normal managerial responsibility by demanding they be paid extra for it. Imagine a parks manager telling the county budget manager: “Here’s a statement of the user fees we collected. If you want me to make sure it’s right, you’ll need to pay extra.”
Straight-out lie: In a final Trumpian flourish, the memo’s author blatantly misrepresented the findings of a study by MIT, Harvard, and the UW Madison researchers (Learning from Recounts, 2017). The WCCA memo claimed the researchers had declared that “hand counts of election results are inherently inaccurate.” Compare that to the researchers’ actual words:
“…careful hand counting in a recount is the gold standard for assessing the true vote totals — in large part because of the greater focus on a single contest, more deliberate processing of ballots, and careful observation by campaign officials and other interested parties….”
* * *
Wisconsin statutes give the buck-stops-here responsibility for election results’ accuracy to the county clerks, and to no one else. Municipal clerks cannot verify results in federal, state, and county races; they have access to the ballots from only their own city, village, or town. The state elections agency is the legal custodian of no ballots at all;
We must insist the county clerks fulfill their responsibility. They have the paper ballots. They have the time. Modern election-audit practices would allow them to verify a few races on the ballot in just two or three days, while statutes allow them at least two weeks before they must certify the election. The only cost would be the hand-counters’ time at $10 or $12 an hour—a tiny fraction of the county’s elections-administration budget. They could randomly select just a few races for verification—just enough to deter election thieves in the races most liable to attract their interest.
And yet, collectively, they refuse.
Update: The Commission wisely ignored the WCCA’s whining and voted unanimously to encourage county clerks to start auditing during their canvass. And as the WCCA memo states, a few county clerks have begun voluntarily to incorporate hand-counted audits into their routine canvass procedures.
Every county clerk in Wisconsin received a memo on October 4, 2018 explaining the current nationwide move to election auditing and providing the clerks with instructions on how to get started.
Only voters, though, can make it happen. Voters who care about election security should contact their county clerk to find out whether their votes in future elections will be protected with hand-counted audits during the county canvass.
If not, the next election on February 19 will provide an excellent opportunity for your clerk to begin developing routine election-audit practices, since it will likely be a low-turnout election. Your county clerk has plenty of time before February to learn about the various methods of checking accuracy and work out his or her local procedures.
Insist on it.
