Has Minnesota Ever Been Audited?

The answer is, No.

Not once, certainly in the last twenty years, since electronic tabulators became standard, has an appropriate audit been completed. Officials will point to the logic & accuracy test (LAT), also known as the public accuracy test (PAT), which occurs before election day, or the tabulator summary tapes signed by election judges (poll workers) on election day, or the post-election review of voting systems, which occurs some days after election day, as evidence of a thorough audit. These are anything but thorough.

Not once, in Minnesota history, have the following records, which MUST be retained according to federal law, been examined for any election side by side, and not even for a modestly-sized school board election or city council race:

1. The ballot image (these are created by the scan of the ballot the tabulator produces upon insertion into the machine)
2. The cast vote record (this is the record generated by the machine through its interpretation of the ballot image it has just produced)
3. The paper ballot

In the section of the book on the auditing phase, much more detail will be gone into. Sadly, many election judges, county election managers, and even county auditors, when I started checking in 2022, did not appear to know what a ballot image or cast vote record was, despite how critical it is to the use of electronic tabulation equipment. For now, let’s look at an historic example, using primary source material.

A Fantastic System

In a memo regarding election materials retention and security sent to all county auditors and election administrators in 2008, Minnesota Secretary of State Mark Ritchie assured the recipients that the very memo they were reading, when shared with the media, would “underscore what a fantastic system we have to protect the integrity of our elections.”

Ritchie then gives fifteen (15) points related to items that should already be secured in sealed ballot boxes and supply boxes, including number 5, all electronic voting systems and counting programs.

Following this, Ritchie lists another nine (9) items that should be retained, including number 9, copies of post-election machine audits, including machine tapes generated as part of that process, or copies of any similar documented means of verification. Minn Stat § 206.89.

What Ritchie fails to make mention of is any retention related to ballot images or cast vote records. Ballot images are the scans taken by the tabulators. Cast vote records are exactly what they say they are, records of the vote cast, as interpreted by the computer of the scanned image of the ballot.

Reviewing the totality of these two pieces of information may have increased the effort of the recount but also would have made the recount a good deal more rigorous. Instead of merely counting and tallying the paper ballots that were in all the sealed boxes, the tallies of those ballots could have been triangulated with the two digital records, the ballot image and its corresponding cast vote record. This digital record was a federal standard since 2005, so it was available but was apparently overlooked in this statewide recount. In retrospect, readers can decide for themselves what Ritchie meant when he said Minnesota had “a fantastic system”.