The Wisconsin Election Commission unanimously approved on Thursday the results of a hand-count audit of the November election, which found that voting machines worked as intended.
Auditors inspected 222,075 ballots — the largest audit in state history — and found only six errors, all caused by humans. They found no signs of hacking, programming errors or machine malfunctions during the midterm.
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"We’re not always going to train our way to 100% compliance," Democratic Commissioner Ann Jacobs said. "I think this is very terrific work."
Five of the errors discovered were the result of creases through unmarked ballot ovals, which caused voting machines to flag the ballots as overvoted. In the case of an overvote, poll workers are required to remake a ballot, rather than override the machine error. It was unlikely that happened in any of the five errors found, auditors noted in their report.
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The sixth error identified was a ballot filled out in green ink, which caused a voting machine not to identify one of the ovals marked. A local clerk told auditors the error was likely missed because of how busy the polling site was.
None of the errors identified would count towards federal standards that set allowable error rates for voting machines.
