New Jersey's fantastic Post-Election Audit Bill

[Neal McBurnett <neal@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Congratulations to New Jersey for passing the best election protection
bill since the requirement for paper ballots!  The governor signed it
today.

This bill puts elections there on a much firmer footing, and is
exactly the right direction for us to be taking.

New Jersey's post-election audit bill, S507/A2730 is the first in the
nation to require hand counts of enough votes to confirm the outcomes
reported by electronic vote-counting systems independently of software.

If the initial 2% audit isn't enough to get the required level of
statistical confidence, they keep counting more ballots.  If necessary
they recount the whole election by hand.

It also deals with the problem that New Jersey and Colorado both have,
that they don't sort absentee ballots by precinct.  So it spells out
how to audit "batches" of votes:

 [the law] requires "batching" of emergency, provisional, absentee,
 military and overseas federal ballots counted centrally at the county
 level so they can be randomly audited (or targeted for an audit) by
 comparing the vote totals of each audited batch, as reported by the
 optical scanner at the time the ballots were scanned, to hand-to-eye
 counts of the same ballots. Every ballot in each of these audit units
 selected for auditing must be hand counted. The use of batch sampling
 was necessary because NJ does not sort absentee ballots by
 precinct.

http://e-voter.blogspot.com/2008/01/new-jerseys-post-election-audit-bill_02.html

Cheers,

Neal McBurnett                 http://mcburnett.org/neal/