May 19 Special Election: official and independent counts

The May 19 Special Election final results are in.

The County results are from the Humboldt County Elections office website.

The independent results are generated by running Ballot Browser against the Transparency Project's ballot images, using a vote threshold "lightness" of 226 (on a scale of 0 [black] to 255 [white]). That is, a vote oval that registered an average brightness of 226/255 or lower was counted as a vote. Approximately 50 ballots that were rejected by Ballot Browser were hand counted. These rejections were mostly due to excessive skew in the image.

The county and independent results agree to 0.01% on five of the six propositions. On proposition 1C, they agree to 0.02%.

As time permits, we may try to track down these (very minor) differences.

COUNTY - - - - - INDEPENDENT
#------- %-------- /// #------ %---------
1A
09661 37.44% / 09661 37.45%
16143 62.56% / 16138 62.55%

1B
10537 40.92% / 10537 40.91%
15215 59.08% / 15218 59.09%

1C
08751 34.00% / 08749 33.98%
16985 66.00% / 16995 66.02%

1D
08419 32.89% / 08422 32.89%
17179 67.11% / 17183 67.11%

1E
08151 31.83% / 08147 31.82%
17455 68.17% / 17457 68.18%

1F
20966 81.18% / 20965 81.17%
04861 18.82% / 04865 18.83%

May 19 ballot images now online

Lower resolution ballot image "montages" are available now at http://www.humetp.org/may19montages . Zip files of the original scan collection will be available on higher bandwidth sites sometime soon, or you can purchase a DVD from Humboldt County's elections office.

There are 26,040 ballot images (a few of which represent accidentally scanned ballot backs) in 260 montage files.

Although the ballot count was approximately 22,000 in Humboldt's election night final report, the final count includes approximately 4,000 additional ballots, mostly vote-by-mail ballots that came in close to election day but were not counted by election day.

We've already performed a preliminary count of these images via Ballot Browser, and the preliminary Ballot Browser vote percentages match the current election office results to well within a tenth of a percent. We are now going over the approximately 150 images that Ballot Browser kicked out for manual inspection, and will present complete independent counts within a few days.

Less drama this time, huh?

May 19 Special Election

Yes, the transparency project will be releasing ballot images from the May 19 Special Election real soon now. Volunteers have scanned 21,000 of the just under 22,000 ballots cast. Ballot images and at least one independent count will likely be available sometime next week.

MN audit report

Citizens for Election Integrity Minnesota has released what looks to me like an extraordinarily well-done report: “Eyes on the Vote Count: Non-partisan observer reports of Minnesota's 2008 audit and recount" It can be downloaded at www.ceimn.org