Leon County’s election counts are overwhelmingly accurate and reliable, according to an audit tool designed by the LeRoy Collins Institute (LCI) at Florida State University.
The 2022 Leon County postelection audit project, spearheaded by LCI Director Lonna Atkeson and Leon County Supervisor of Elections Mark Earley, provides voters easier access to election information online. The project is a first-of-its-kind effort to place the postelection auditing data online alongside ballot image data for public review.
The new audit tool showed Leon County’s 2022 election vote count was 99.9983% accurate for the general election and 99.9985% for the primary.
“The public display of the audit and ballot image data comes at an important time as we gear up for a new, contentious election cycle,” Atkeson said. “Public mistrust of our elections is at an all-time high, and we hope that placing these data at voters’ fingertips will give them more confidence in our election process and results.”
Through their normal postelection audit, Earley and his staff run all the ballots in Leon County through a second vote tabulator and compare those results to the official vote counts.
“This is a groundbreaking audit of all of Leon’s County ballots, one that provides tremendous reassurance in the integrity of our voting process,” Earley said. “We hope other counties and states follow suit, making our elections more transparent and secure while helping to increase trust in our election systems.”
The project’s website houses a primary and general election dashboard that can be used to review data from the two independent vote tabulation counts. It can sort ballot image data by precinct, voting method and the ballot choices, including overvotes and undervotes.
The website also has images of unusual ballots showing how voters sometimes add elements that make it more challenging to accurately count their votes, including ballots that have drawings, notes and other stray marks.
The election integrity project, completed by the LeRoy Collins Institute at Florida State University, was conducted in collaboration with researchers at Fresno State; the University of New Mexico; FSU’s College of Social Sciences and Public Policy; MIT’s Elections Data and Science Lab; and the Leon County Supervisor of Elections Office.
For more information, visit 2022voterdata.lci.fsu.edu.