As I mentioned in in a previous post, and even included as my Wordless Wednesday picture, I spend several hours today observing people in the Waterbury Registrar of Voter’s office audit the results of this month’s elections by hand counting the ballots and comparing the results with what the optical scanning machines produced.

It was a long and tedious process for the folks in Waterbury. They had six districts that had been selected for the audit. In each district, they needed to randomly select three races. Unfortunately for them, they ended up selecting several multi-candidate races, so the tallying and cross referencing took a particularly long time, and their audit report to the Secretary of States office will probably end up being between twenty and thirty pages long.

Waterbury, like some of the other large cities in Connecticut has a bad reputation in terms of voting, so I was particularly curious about how they would react to the observers and how well the audit would go.

I had been told that the audit was supposed to start at 10:00 AM, but by the time I got there, a few minutes early, there were already six teams going through the ballots. First, they sorted out the questionable ballots from the ballots that appeared clear cut. There were very few questionable ballots, mostly cases where people had put a large check mark that covered part of the oval and space outside the oval. There were some discussions about how overvotes were handled.

Once the questionable ballots were set aside, they then went through each ballot and tallied the votes on the specific offices in question. Hours later, the moderators added up the tallies and compared them with the results from optical scanners.

While the process was tedious, and people were all just learning their way. People complained about how expensive the new machines were and the new processes. They talked about the problems of the recounts and hoped that State Reps would come count ballots.

Yet for all the tedious time consumption, I thought it went incredibly well. The Registrar’s office in Waterbury did a great job. They were accurate and efficient, and it appears on first glance, that the machines functioned very well.

It will be interesting to see how the other audits go, but I was very impressed with my first observation of an audit of the new voting machines in Connecticut.