AUDITS OR FRAUDITS?
By Bev Harris | Black Box Voting
Nov 18, 2016
http://blackboxvoting.org/audits-or-fraudits/

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Most of the activities termed “audits” in elections are not audits at all, but are really spot checks. An actual audit differs in these important ways:

– It is holistic, cross-checking information from a variety of source documents;
– Discrepancies trigger nonrestricted expansion of the audit;
– The entity being audited is not allowed to constrain the audit;
– A real audit involves selections based on hunches, red flags, and suspicions as well as targeting by random choice.

Why it’s important to call it a spot check not an audit: A spot check cannot prove an election was sound or that its results were accurate. Ballot spot checks can help to discover errors and may, in some cases, act as a deterrent for certain types of election fraud, but referring to spot-checks as “audits” produces false confidence and often causes election officials and the media to overstate the implications of the spot check.

HOW TO DETECT A SHAM

1. All phases must be publicly observable. Were ballots sorted or chosen before observers arrived? Was target selection fully transparent and public? Were any essential records deemed “off limits”?
2. Precinct results must be published and publicly available well before samples are selected for spot check.
3. Selection must be an unpredictable surprise. UNPREDICTABLE is not the same thing as RANDOM. Also, there should not be any unobserved time lapse between selection and spot check.

Example: Fresno County California was preselecting its spot-check precincts two months before the election. In the 2004 Ohio presidential recount, Cuyahoga County employees admitted to choosing their own precincts for a spot check, stating “our random is our random.” (Watch the film “Hacking Democracy” for footage of this scene, videotaped by a citizen observer.)

4. All ballot questions must be checkable. Random selection of one or two races is unlikely to pick the most controversial race, or the few races most at risk for fraud.
5. Selection must begin with the whole set of precincts, and public observers must have a way to confirm that the whole set was used.

Example: Several years ago in West Virginia a county election official chose a “random sample” of precincts using slips of paper in a bag. When an observer, videotaping the process, asked her to empty out the bag to show that it contained a slip of paper for every precinct, the official hurriedly left the room (holding the bag) and then returned with the bag containing all its precincts. Computer selection may seem more professional than slips in a paper bag but is actually even less transparent. Observers may have difficulty verifying that every one of the hundreds of precincts in a large jurisdiction are actually included in the spot check selection program.