Improving the Security, Transparency, and Efficiency of California's 1% Manual Tally Procedures

California jurisdictions have an extensive history of conducting post-election manual tallies of ballot records; they have performed this type audit since the 1960s when the use of lever and punchcard voting technologies became common statewide. We report findings from studying manual tally procedures in a handful of California counties. Through a combination of iterative procedure development and observation of manual tally activities, we designed new procedures that better promote security, transparency and efficiency. We have since generalized these procedures for use in any California county.1