Wisconsin elections audit gets underway today

While other states continue to recount this month’s elections to determine winners, Wisconsin will conduct several random recounts Tuesday to show the election system is working.

The audit by the Wisconsin Elections Commission is nothing new and has proven for over a decade, the results are correct.

“We recount twice by hand to make sure the numbers the hand count comes up with are the same that the machines told us on election night,” Election Commission staffer Reid Magney said. “We’ve been doing this since 2006. The numbers always come out correct.”

Magney says a big reason for the audit is to prove the accuracy of the voting system to skeptics.

“We don’t want to believe the election results and want to believe something bad’s happened,” Magney said. “And, part of this, frankly, is being able to tell them, ‘No, the votes were not intercepted somehow and were not somehow flipped. This is actually what happened.'”

The traditional audit after a November election will involve just under 200 wards from around the state, picked randomly by the commission.

Magney says 2,851 ballots from La Crosse County will be counted again from the Town of Hamilton and wards 18 and 26 in the City of La Crosse.