Municipal elections in the Fairbanks North Star Borough will now include a manual audit after the polls close, following the Assembly’s passage of an ordinance Thursday night.
The ordinance, sponsored by Assemblymember David Guttenberg, will require the canvassing board to count two contested races from two random precincts and manually verify that the results match those tabulated by the borough’s Dominion Voting System tabulation devices.
A contested race involves a race with two or more people on the ballot, or a proposition.
If there’s more than a 1% discrepancy, the audit will expand to two more precincts. If there is less than 1%, the results stand. Further discrepancies would require an audit of all the races in a precinct. Guttenberg proposed the ordinance following a March 7 Assembly Finance Committee discussion and failed vote over renewing a five-year service contract for the borough’s tabulation machines.
Guttenberg said he believed the election team conducted a random audit after every election. While he defends the ballot tabulation devices, he said a manual audit should be “a natural outcome of what should be done to verify an election.”
Borough Clerk April Trickey said the post-election audit will be conducted in public on the Wednesday following the municipal election. Depending on the precincts, including the early voting station, the audit could take a full day and cost $500 to cover the election workers’ wages.
A written report detailing any discrepancies will be furnished, including whether a ballot was filled in with a red pen, only partially marked, or had multiple marks in a particular race.
More than 30 people testified on the ordinance, including more than 20 who either defended the borough’s current election process or supported the new audit provision. The testimony contrasted sharply with nearly 30 residents who opposed the Dominion machines during the March 7 finance committee meeting.
The large number of testifying residents prompted Assemblymember Mindy O’Neall, the presiding officer, to keep a firm hand on comment times and limit Assemblymembers to one question each asked to citizens.
Tim Quintal said he hoped the manual audit would be followed by renewing the Dominion Voting Systems service contract.
“We use the safest, most reliable, most verifiable system: a ballot that is directly hand-marked by the voter and then machine tabulated,” Quintal said. “This ensures a physical ballot exists that accurately expresses the voter’s wishes and remains accessible for any verification that is needed.”
Quintal said he suspected the Assembly’s March 7 vote may have been swayed “by several uninformed individuals who were taken in by misinformation and conspiracy theories around voting machines.”
Sue Sheriff said Guttenberg’s ordinance “should only increase voter confidence.” She said she supports the borough and city clerks and encouraged the Assembly to bolster clerks’ efforts to “advocate for the safety and security of our elections and combat some of the misinformation that seems to be rampant about how our elections work.”
Several election workers, like Lisa Baraff, encouraged residents to become election workers to understand the process better.
“To become an election worker is eye-opening,” Baraff said. “I was blown away by the numerous security and cross-checking measures we employ, from setting up, running, and closing down the polls.”
Baraff said she believes in Dominion tabulation machines and “in data-driven facts.” The manual audit, she said, provides that extra layer of verification.
Lori Neufeld, another election worker, noted the likely flaws in switching back to hand-counting all ballots, including increased costs, labor, and the chance of mistakes.
“This ordinance is a very good balance,” she said. “We do not need to go all hands-on-hand counting all races on all ballots in all precincts. The ballot tabulation machines increase efficiency and accuracy of our elections.”
Neufeld noted that misinformation against Dominion Voting Machines landed Fox News in a major lawsuit in 2023. Fox settled with Dominion out of court, paying $787 million.
“There can be consequences for peddling lies to good Americans like us,” Neufeld said.
Other residents recited long-debunked conspiracy theories that the Dominion tabulation machines could be manipulated or hacked remotely.
Ruby Shorey called the ordinance “a feeble attempt at finding common ground.”
A few residents claimed that the lack of a new five-year contract will make the borough’s tabulation devices less reliable. Despite the failed renewal, the borough can authorize a one-year service contract with Dominion for the Oct. 7 municipal election. Future service contracts on an annual basis are subject to annual budget appropriations.
“We the people have expressed and want one-day elections, with minor exceptions, paper ballots, hand-counting, and same-day election results,” Shorey said. “A more accurate resolution would be that.”
She said auditing two random precincts doesn’t pass muster and claimed there is no way to verify “whether our votes are counted correctly” by the tabulation machines.
“Hand-counting ballots is a tried and true method used for many years,” Shorey said.
Sally Duncan said she doubts the current Assembly makeup will result in switching back to a complete hand-count election process. Instead, she asked the Assembly for a compromise: to have a minimum of 25 precincts counted by hand immediately after an election.
The borough has 33 precincts, including the early voting station.
“Two precincts is kind of ridiculous, especially if they are very small,” she said. “It doesn’t give you a very good representation.” She estimated it should be done by midnight, especially if volunteers helped.
Ruben McNeill called Guttenberg’s ordinance a “second bite at the apple for Dominion machines and a slap in the face to the people” who testified against the contract renewal on March 6.
“There are enough questions and doubts in the Dominion voting machines that we should move on from that,” McNeill said. “You’re taking away an opportunity for the community to come together, sit at a table, and count ballots.”
Assembly adjustments
During Assembly debate, Guttenberg successfully pushed an amendment to tighten his ordinance. His original version stated that further audits would be conducted if discrepancies exceeded 1% or 10 ballots, whichever was greater. He said for small precincts, like Fort Wainwright, finding discrepancies in more than 10 ballots would never happen.
Scott Crass called it a good example of “trust but verify.”
“It allows us to trust our election workers and our process, but also verify,” he said. “It gives us a check to see if something goes haywire.”
Tammie Wilson successfully amended the ordinance to include two precincts and the early voting ballots in the audit. She said this would provide a measure of confidence for voters who prefer to have their ballots hand-counted.
“If you want to make sure your ballot will be looked at again, you would have the option to go to the early voting station,” Wilson said.
The early voting station is the borough’s largest precinct, with 2,000 to 3,000 ballots on average.
Guttenberg disagreed with the amendment, noting his ordinance focuses on an audit’s randomness. If a person had concerns about the unlikely chance of hacking a voter tabulation machine, the most concern might stem from the early voting site.
The amendment passed with a 6-3 vote, with Guttenberg and members O’Neall and Kristan Kelly voting no.
‘Bigger sample’
Brett Rotermund tried moving an amendment to require the count of all contested races in the audit pool.
He said he never bought into conspiracy theories that the tabulation machines could be hacked, but he acknowledged that a large group of people don’t trust machines. As a result, they’ve stopped voting.
He said expanding the audit to all the contested races would reinforce voter confidence.
“The spirit of this is to get a sampling,” Rotermund said. “If we want to prove these machines are either accurate or inaccurate truly, we’ve got to have a bigger sampling.”
Trickey, the borough clerk, said that the time and cost could increase depending on the number of contested races and candidates. She said the audit could take two days to complete, with each day costing $500.
Rotermund’s amendment failed in a 3-6 vote, with Wilson, Rotermund, and Barbara Haney voting yes.
Crass noted that assurances can only go so far and that Rotermund’s amendment “moves us away from being able to conduct our elections quickly.”
“At a certain point, we’re not going to be able to help people drinking poison in their ecosystem,” Crass said. “We do what we can ... but this amendment is a bridge too far.”
The overall ordinance passed 5-4, with Crass, Kelly, Guttenberg, Liz Reeves-Ramos, and Nick LaJiness voting yes. Rotermund, Haney, Wilson, and O’Neall voted no.
In explaining her ‘no’ vote, O’Neall called the original ordinance a good compromise that still didn’t garner full Assembly support.
“I don’t think voting is something we need to compromise on,” O’Neall said. “We should be doing a better job of working together. Let’s be better, let’s be leaders because everything is falling apart around us, the federal government and state government are falling apart.”