ST. GEORGE — Down in the basement of Washington County Administration Building on Wednesday afternoon, county elections clerk Melanie Abplanalp and assistant county attorney Devin Snow sat at a table and checked to see if the votes on ballots casts by county residents matched what the county’s voting machines had recorded.
They were in the middle of the state-required post-election audit for the recent congressional and municipal primary election. The purpose of the audit was not to provide a total of the votes and thereby confirm who won, but rather to make sure the machines recorded those votes correctly.
Sitting nearby were a handful of individuals who had come to observe the auditing process. Some were there to see how the process worked, while others came with misgivings about the machines used and aimed to make their own audit record based on the votes reported.
“Since those audits aren’t doing anything to confirm that the right candidate won — they’re checked to to make sure the votes were recorded correctly — but they’re doing nothing to check to make sure the counts were recorded correctly,” said Wendy Godlewski, a county resident and member of the group Southern Utahns for Transparency, who claims election integrity is among their primary concerns.
Worries over election integrity stem from unproven disputes of fraud surrounding the 2020 election, as well as the results of the 2022 Utah House 72 primary race that some county residents continue to question.
Godlewski is among the group of citizens who repeatedly signs up for public comment opportunities at Washington County Commission meetings to express their concerns about how the county conducts its elections. One of their central goals is to get the county to return to hand-counting election results due to worries that results recorded by machines can be manipulated via third parties or hackers.
“This is why members of the public are trying to take tallies at this post-election audits,” she said.
As Snow read off the names of the candidates who had been voted for, Abplanalp looked at a machine-recorded copy of the ballot and confirmed whether or not they matched. The machine-copy of the ballot was also displayed on a large wall-mounted screen for the public to verify for themselves.
As the audit progressed, Godlewski asked Snow to speak slower so she would get a count of the votes and seemed frustrated at what she considered an inaccurate record. County residents concerned about last year’s primary election results were able to take audio recordings of the votes that were read off and double checked the results that way, but not this year, she stated.
No photos or video or audio recordings were allowed in the basement as the audit got underway. One of the assistant county attorney’s later told St. George News that this was due to recent changes in state law.
“They should have allowed us to do an audio recording of today’s post election audit,” Godlewski said, adding she believes the county attorneys are misinterpreting the intent of the law.
The inability to make recordings or take photos wasn’t the only change to the audit process this year.
Unlike previous years, where the audit involved batches of 50 ballots randomly picked by the Utah Lt. Governor’s Office, this year involved a number of randomly picked precincts instead. This was due to a new machine county officials had purchased in order to make the auditing process, and if necessary, a recount, much easier.
Washington County Clerk/Auditor Ryan Sullivan told St. George News following the audit that before the change, random batches contained ballots from all over the county and made a recount an arduous endeavor. Now that the county has the ability to audit those batches by precinct, it helps simplify the overall process.
The random precinct batches came from parts of Hurricane, St. George and Washington City and included anywhere from eight ballots to 40 or more and took about an hour to be counted. Each precinct used in the audit was found to have been recorded correctly.
Sullivan spoke with St. George News following the audit and reiterated the purpose was only to check that the machines recorded the votes correctly and nothing more.
According to an audit of the state’s election systems and controls published in late 2022, post-election audits haven’t been used as a means to check vote totals since 2006.
While Sullivan said he said he doesn’t put complete faith in election machines, they are “still a lot better at counting than humans” and that he is “very pleased with how things are going right now.”
Still, Sullivan plans to hold a hand audit of random precincts at the County Clerk/Auditor’s Office next Tuesday for those who do not trust the machine reports. The hand-audit is something Sullivan promised be would do prior to being appointed as the county clerk/auditor last year.
“I have all the faith in the world (in the audit process), but I want to do it for the public and I want to do it to help put some concerns to rest,” he said.
As for the idea of holding an overall hand count of the primary election results, Sullivan previously said during the Sept. 5 Washington County Commission that, “I am not hand counting, I am going to audit.”
He also said the processes Washington County had in place to promote the election integrity of mail-in voting were “tried and true” and set in place long before the mad-dash other states experienced setting up voting by mail during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Godlewski noted her group is holding its own hand-counting demonstration at the Washington City Community Center on Sept. 25 at 5:45 p.m.
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