>>14548366 El Cajon Democrat Wants Every Election in America Audited
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El Cajon Democrat Wants Every Election in America Audited, Starts with 4 States
by Ken Stone 1 day ago
Ray Lutz lists his wife, Jill, and sons Garrett and Austin as three of five directors of his nonprofit Citizens’ Oversight Projects. Image via Facebook
The leader of a small East County nonprofit says independent audits should be conducted after all U.S. elections. He has sought or gained access to ballot images in states including battlegrounds Arizona, Florida, Georgia and Wisconsin.
“We want every county audited,” says the group’s president. “Georgia … was a very critical election this time around. And there were a lot of questions about whether it was done right or not. In fact, even recently there was all this talk about ballots being brought in suitcases and Rudy Giuliani was down there. Haven’t you been watching the news?”
Another Republican-led effort to cast doubt on Joe Biden’s victory?
Think again.
Citizens’ Oversight Projects founder Ray Lutz of El Cajon is a Democrat.
He’s known for his fight over San Onofre nuclear plant waste disposal, going on an 11-day hunger strike as a 2010 congressional challenger of Republican Duncan D. Hunter and being arrested near San Diego City Hall at a 2011 Occupy Wall Street demonstration.
And his 2017 lawsuit against then-Registrar of Voters Michael Vu sought access to ballots, fearing “possible tampering of the early [vote-by-mail] ballots in the 2016 primary election.” Lutz lost.
His motto might be: “The only way to stop a bad guy with an audit is a good guy with an audit.”
Since 2019, Lutz, 64, has been promoting his “AuditEngine,” which recruits up to 10,000 Amazon Web Services computers to inspect images of paper ballots. By not overlooking bubbles being circled or checkmarks next to names, his tool is more accurate than official machine counts, he claims. It also detects when ballot images get corrupted through “stretching” by scanner rollers.
“About 93% of the time, we do a better job of evaluating voter intent than these voting systems,” he told Times of San Diego. But the difference is 0.1% to 0.2% — “and that’s going to be evenly split between both [parties] — so it really doesn’t shift the result.”
(He adds: “There’s a lot of feedback to the election officials that we can provide to improve their process that is not at the level of overturning the election.”)
An expert with the nonpartisan Verified Voting Foundation agrees that post-election auditing is a good idea. But the scholar, Senior Policy Associate C.Jay Coles, worries about the accuracy of ballot-image audits. More on that later.
In mid-June, Lutz wrote to Republican Karen Fann, president of the Arizona Senate, touting his system as “extremely transparent.”
Referring to the Cyber Ninjas audit of 2.1 million ballots in Maricopa County, Lutz wrote: “The hand count of the paper ballots and the count of the ballot images act as a check on each other to ensure a fair and accurate outcome and increase public confidence in the outcome.”
He proposed to do audits of Pima (with Tucson) and Pinal counties as well as Phoenix-home Maricopa, “which combined … would cover about 80% of the electorate. If we add Yavapai, Mohave and Yuma Counties, that will cover 90%.”
Hours later, Fann responded via email: “Thank you Mr. Lutz. I will discuss with the team. I very much appreciate your insight.”
The upshot? Negotiations over hiring Lutz broke down over control of his audit’s final report.
“Essentially, the big stumbling block from our side is the fact that they wanted to make it very secret, and nontransparent,” he said.
Even so, Cyber Ninjas offered Lutz $50,000 to conduct a ballot-image audit, which he declined.
“We would only work directly for the Senate,” he said. “[Cyber Ninjas] had too many restrictions on the result, with no guarantee that they would not shelve it, and we could not invite observers to witness the audit process.”
Fann’s office didn’t respond to a request for comment. Neither did Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs nor Ken Bennett, a former secretary of state Lutz worked with, and other allies, including former Arizona GOP Chairman Randy Pullen and “elections integrity advocate” John Brakey of Audit-USA.
Undaunted by Arizona, Lutz is working to acquire November 2020 ballot images in 27 of Georgia’s 159 counties. He tested AuditEngine in Volusia County, Florida, which includes Daytona Beach. And he says a right-wing legal firm wanted to hire his team to verify results in the top eight counties in Wisconsin…..
https://timesofsandiego.com/politics/2021/09/08/el-cajon-democrat-wants-every-election-in-america-audited-starts-with-4-states/