Vote audit in Berlin today

Once again, a Berlin voting precinct was selected, in a lottery, for an election audit by the state which took place Nov. 20.

Since the implementation of the optical scan machines, by law, 10 percent of the machines are matched against hand-counted totals to ensure the integrity of the voting.

This was an audit of the general election results from Nov. 4.

Connecticut has the toughest election s audit law in the country and I am confident at the end of this year's audit the numbers will match," said Secretary of the State Susan Bysiewicz.

District 4 (the Senior Center) in Berlin was one of 84 voting precincts, in 50 towns, were selected by lottery for an audit. Berlin also had voting district selected after the previous election. Bysiewicz, along with voting rights advocates, randomly selected the precincts at a drawing at the state capitol Nov. 13.

"We're just lucky," Registrar of Voters Charles Warner joked.

Two teams of election officials were at Town Hall for the count. Also on hand, were two representatives from Connecticut Citizen Election Audit Coalition. The coalition consists of representatives from the League of Women Voters, CT Voters Count, Connecticut Common Cause and the Connecticut Citizen Action Group.

"We're looking for ways to improve (the vote counting)," said Evelyn Garrow, who along with Kathleen Jackson, were in Berlin as representatives of the coalition. She said one of the coalition's goals is to see more consistency in how votes are counted across the state.

Registrar of Voters Elizabeth Tedeschi said there are numerous ways a ballot could come into question and the audit could help identify questionable ballots. For example, if a voter circled the oval which is supposed to be filled in. Or, if a person put the pen on the oval or began to mark it and then changed his mind and went to another oval.

The question is, would the optical scan machine read those ballots or not.

Tedeschi said 1,794 ballots went through the District 4 optical scan machine.

"Auditing election results isn't just a good idea, it's absolutely essential in order to guarantee the integrity of our elections," Bysiewicz said. "Record numbers of Connecticut residents cast ballots on Nov. 4 and we don't just take the machines' word for it. So we will have every ballot case in a full 10 percent of all our precincts hand-counted and matched against the machine totals."