Nebraska Secretary of State Bob Evnen today announced the completion of the 2022 General Election manual audit. Since 2008, a manual audit has been conducted following each statewide election. This year, the audit was expanded from two to three percent of precincts to 10 percent. The manual audit verifies that the equipment properly functioned on Election Day and was not tampered with at any point following pre-election testing.
“A manual count of 48,292 ballots from 132 voting precincts across all 93 Nebraska counties verifies that the equipment utilized to count ballots is secure and accurate,” said Secretary Evnen.
A minimum of one precinct from every county was audited. They were chosen at random counties with more than one precinct. Additional precincts were apportioned based on county population and then randomly selected within the county. The races for Governor, US House of Representatives, and a local race in the county were hand-counted in each precinct.
Of the more than 48,000 ballots that were hand-counted in the audit, there were just 11 discrepancies between the machine count and the hand count: an error rate of twenty-three thousandths of one percent. Five of the 11 differences came about due to voters having placed light marks on the ballots, so it’s questionable if these are discrepancies at all.
Prior to any election, every ballot tabulator in the state is tested three times with test decks of ballots to confirm that the tabulators are counting and reporting results accurately.
“These evaluations demonstrate the very high degree of accuracy and integrity of Nebraska’s ballot counting and reporting process,” Secretary Evnen said. “Nebraska voters can be confident that their ballots will continue to be cast securely and counted and reported accurately.”