Oconto County completes post-election voting machine audit

The goal is to confirm that the machines compiled the vote tally accurately
By: 
Warren Bluhm
Editor-in-chief

Poll workers from three Oconto County municipalities went through the arduous process Nov. 28 of confirming that their communities’ voting machines did their job accurately on Election Day, and no glitches were found.

The post-election voting equipment audit is required under the federal Help American Vote Act and overseen by the Wisconsin Elections Commission. Municipalities are selected at random to go through the physical ballots one at a time and ensure that the tallies reported on Election Night match the actual votes cast.

The Village of Lena and the towns of Mountain and Gillett got selected this time around. The first audit in 2020 was for the Town of Morgan, and the process was expanded this year to include three local municipalities, County Clerk Kim Pytleski said.

Pytleski and Deputy Clerk Kathy Goldschmidt walked the group through the audit process, which began with unsealing the ballot bags. Each bag’s seal number was read out loud and double checked to ensure the bag was the actual bag of ballots cast in that municipality. The seal numbers were read aloud again when the ballots were repacked at the end of the audit.

Great care was taken to protect and preserve the paper ballots, including a prohibition on water on the tables where the ballots were being examined.

The audit crews were to look for “oddities” on the ballot, like a dot instead of a completely filled-in oval. Pytleski stressed that this was an audit of the voting machine readout — not a recount. So the voter’s intent was not to be considered.

“If someone circled the name instead of filling in the oval, we don’t count that as a vote because the machine wouldn’t have,” Pytleski said. “You should only count the votes as the machine would have counted them.”

The ballots were separated into piles of exactly 25 and 50, and then one person read the names while two others tallied up the votes for each candidate. For purposes of this audit, the teams checked the results for governor, attorney general, secretary of state and Assembly representative from their respective municipalities.

“If there’s any discrepancy when you get done — you have different totals from one another and you can’t figure out why — we’ll just have you re-tally again,” Pytleski said. “We have another sheet, and on that one it’ll be your second count and we’ll mark it ‘recount.’”

Each tally was to be compared to the counts reported by the machines on Election Night, with any discrepancies set aside and the findings emailed to the state. According to a fact sheet prepared by the elections commission, the purpose of the audit is to ensure that the votes tabulated by the equipment were counted accurately and correctly.

If the error rate exceeds the rate permitted under federal elections commission standards, the state would be required to order remedial action. The commission selected 368 reporting units at random from across Wisconsin’s 72 counties. The methodical auditing process was spelled out by the commission, and each reporting unit was expected to follow the same process.

The audit is open to the public and invitations were sent to local political parties, Pytleski said, but only one person — a reporter — took advantage of that opportunity.

Municipalities are eligible to be reimbursed $50 for materials and audit setup, plus 35 cents per ballot audited, Pytleski said.