User:Prairiefire2

Introducing myself...I'm a retired white American woman. I have a master's degree from UW-Madison in public administration. My 30-year career in public service was spent (in chronological order):

• working on the staff of the US Senate Appropriations Committee for Health, Education, and Welfare (doesn't exist anymore, since education was split off);
• working as a records management consultant for the Wisconsin Supreme Court;
• supervising management audits and program evaluations for the Wisconsin Legislative Audit Bureau (my favorite job, and the one that most shaped my skills and interests); and
• managing statewide quality assurance programs for the Wisconsin Department of Health's long-term care division.

Since retiring in 2011, I've been active in election administration advocacy. In particular, I am interested in systemic improvements to ensure our votes are counted accurately.

Shortly after I retired, a friend who had worked as an municipal clerk in Dane County, Wisconsin, approached me and said that someone of my skills and dedication was needed in the field. He told me that I'd be astounded at how few safeguards are built into our vote-counting processes. He said that insiders in the voting-machine company and people who work in a county clerk's office have ready access to the software. He said that if anyone did electronically manipulate Wisconsin's election results, the fraud would go undetected. In addition to the risk of electronic fraud, he said that human error and machine malfunction affect election results all the time.

I looked into it, and he is correct. In Wisconsin (and most other US jurisdictions, I've since learned), no one ever verifies vote totals before election results are declared final. After election results are certified final, few states provide any way to change them, so the error is considered water under the bridge, not newsworthy. Only rarely are even superficial investigations conducted. The 2016 Wisconsin recount found more than 11,000 miscounted votes (both human error and computer error), but because the miscounts affected both major-party candidates equally, correcting them didn't change the outcome and didn't make the news. No investigations were conducted to ascertain the cause of any of the discovered miscounts; local election clerks simply stated what they thought caused the miscounts.

It's an area I urge every American citizen to look into, as an individual voter, and get the facts for your local community. Start by contacting your local elections official (typically, a municipal clerk or county clerk, whoever signs the 'certification statement' that makes election results final). Ask them to describe the process by which they check whether the vote-tabulating computers counted votes correctly on Election Day, or whether they declare election results final without checking. Be prepared to hear how they check the right number of ballots were counted (most do), but don't stop questioning until you understand how they make sure the vote totals are correct. Also be prepared to be told about pre-election security and testing (also very common, thankfully), but don't stop questioning until you understand how they confirm it all worked correctly on Election Day.

Be satisfied with your election official's answers only when you've received an answer that convinces you that your election officials take at least as much care to make sure your election results are accurate as, say, the manager of your supermarket takes with the grocery checkout scanners' output. We don't need sky-high standards--just the basic care and prudence appropriate to managing any automated system.