DC Council releases their findings

As I wrote about yesterday, the DC Council is looking into what went wrong in the primary election last month. Today, the results of their investigation were released; the report can be found here. If I worked for the vendor, Sequoia Voting Solutions, I'd be unhappy - the council accepted the recommendations of the experts (including me), and generally rejected Sequoia's excuses.

The report concludes with three main recommendations.

1. The District should set up an independent voting-technology experts to perform a forensic study of what went wrong.

2. The Board of Elections should improve its procedures to do a better job detecting problems like those in the preliminary results, and address them before releasing the results.

3. The Board of Elections should set up effective post-election audits. (Kudos to Larry Norden from NYU for his excellent information in this area).

4. The Board of Elections should provide better training to pollworkers. Pollworker training is critical everywhere, and its importance is usually underestimated.

5. The Board of Elections should set up procedures to ensure a rapid but accurate release of preliminary results.

6. The Board of Elections should have policies in place for public communication in case something goes wrong.

I'm pleased with the results of the DC Council investigation. Now comes the hard work - putting these recommendations into practice!