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Post-election audit confirms vote results in Grundy Co.

Grundy County conducted the required post-election audit on Monday, November 8, 2021, pursuant to the law designed to monitor and protect election processes. Five citizens from Grundy County, each registered as members of either the Democratic or Republican political parties, met at the Grundy County Courthouse in Grundy Center to conduct the post-election audit of the votes cast in Precinct 6 at the November 2, 2021, City/School Election. Grundy County Auditor Rhonda R. Deters supervised the hand count of the ballots from that precinct. The audit was a perfect match to the results recorded on Election Night.

Iowa law requires that after each election the Secretary of State will randomly choose one precinct in each Iowa county to be audited. County auditors must then supervise a hand count of the ballots from the selected precinct and compare the results from the presidential or gubernatorial election, depending on the year, or from the first race on the first ballot style in other elections to the voting machine count from Election Night.

In Grundy County, the Secretary of State chose Precinct 6 which votes at the Reinbeck Memorial Building where 18 votes were cast in the first ballot style on Election Day. Both the machine count from Election Night and the hand count on Monday morning showed that Bret Badker received 13 votes and there were 5 undervotes.

Grundy County Auditor Rhonda R. Deters said that the audit is proof of the reliability of the election system in Iowa. “This is exactly what we expected and what we want to see,” said Grundy County Auditor Rhonda R. Deters. “The hand count shows that our machines are accurately counting the ballots. This is one of numerous safeguards to the system, and it is especially significant because it is proof after the fact.”

This law was in part a response to concerns about computer hackers altering election results. In Iowa the voting machines as well as the programming and tabulating computers are not hooked up to the internet and hacking the vote is highly unlikely. Being able to rely on paper ballots provides confidence in the integrity of the voting system. This post-election audit is in addition to extensive testing of the ballot tabulators conducted by the County Auditor’s Office in advance of every election to assure that the tabulators are accurately recording each vote from the paper ballots cast at the election.