WEC: November 2022 voting equipment free of mechanical errors

MADISON, Wis. (WMTV) - An audit held after the November 2022 election found that all of the voting equipment used during general election was free of mechanical errors, the Wisconsin Elections Commission (WEC) announced Friday.

Election officials said this audit was the largest in state history, with auditors checking 10% of all reporting units and nearly 225,000 ballots. The WEC unanimously declared that there was nothing wrong with the voting equipment surveyed.

The audit did identify six issues caused by human error, which the WEC noted did not change the outcome of any contest. The six errors were among four separate municipalities and affected a single contest on each individual ballot.

The audit, which required county and municipal clerks to hand tally ballots back in November and December, was used to find an error rate for the voting system. The audit of 357 randomly-selected reporting units found that the equipment:

Didn’t change votes from one candidate to another
Correctly tabulated votes
Did not alter the outcome of any audited contest
Did not have any programming errors
Was free from any unauthorized alterations, hacking of voting software or malfunctions

The WEC said that not every municipality was measured, but the audit included at least one reporting unit per county and five reporting units for each type of counting equipment.

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