Auditing for Accuracy

When many think of election night, they think of the end of a long process. Usually, election night represents the culmination of weeks, months, or even years of work to get to the “finish line.”

For elections professionals, however, election night represents the start of a new phase of the process: the post-election audit.

In the past, the post-election audit in Sarasota County involved the random selection of precincts and races to determine which ballots would be counted manually. Following each election - and following Florida law - we would begin the time-consuming process of manually counting selected ballots to demonstrate that the electronic tabulation totals matched the manual totals.

Two elections office employees manually count ballots during an audit following the 2021 City of Venice General Election and Town of Longboat Key Referendum.

Starting with the November 7 City of Venice General Election, the elections office is implementing a new audit process. Instead of randomly selecting a percentage of the precincts to tally, 100 percent of the ballots cast will be audited by an independent, stand-alone system. In effect, we will count the ballots twice, using two separate systems. We will compare the voting system tabulator totals with the audit totals to ensure the accuracy and integrity of all votes cast.  

The new audit system certainly adds steps to an already complex process, but we feel it is worth the extra effort to provide voters with an additional layer of transparency.

SarasotaVotes.gov