This morning I read about a disputed election, for the student representative position on the Los Angeles Community College District board. It was written up in today’s Los Angeles Times, “After 2 contested elections, L.A. Community College District may finally have a tech fix.”

The basic issues with this election are that they are using paper ballots for the student trustee elections, and that they don’t seem to have any routine post-election auditing procedures to check the veracity of the hand-counting of the paper ballots. According to the story, “The fight may seem high schoolish, but it underscores a technology problem at the largest community college district in the nation. Instead of using machines to tally paper ballots, district officials counted them by hand. And instead of employing safeguards to make sure students voted only once, an audit revealed that up to six people voted twice.”

This just brought back memories of elections past, of paper ballots being counted by hand, and elections being conducted without strong post-election audit procedures. Regardless of whether the election is for the president of the United States, or for a student trustee to a local board, having strong administrative procedures can help insure that when elections are close and the results are disputed, there aren’t questions about the integrity of the election.