Auditing a DRE-Based Election in South Carolina

Following a highly publicized and anomalous outcome in the South Carolina statewide Democratic primary South Carolina in June 2010, the authors undertook to audit the election results based on data obtainable through the Freedom of Information Act. The state votes entirely on paperless ES&S iVotronic Direct Recording Electronic (DRE) machines. There is thus no auditable primary data (such as paper ballots), but there are several audit trail files that are produced by the software of the ES&S system. We have analyzed these files and have been able to show that votes were not counted, that procedures that should have been checked automatically were not checked, and that vote data to support the certified counts has not been collected or stored.