SANTA FE, N.M. (KRQE) – Auditors are rolling the dice, literally. To check the results of the 2022 November election, officials have spent the day rolling ten-sided dice to decide which voting precinct’s results will be checked.
“This is a process that we go through here in New Mexico after every general election,” said New Mexico Secretary of State Maggie Toulouse Oliver during the public dice roll. “We’ve been doing this since the law requiring this was passed into law in 2008.”
The idea is to roll dice to randomly choose which voting precincts to examine and verify via audit. “The point of selecting them randomly is to make sure that no bad actor or anybody with any ill intent can know beforehand which precincts will be selected,” Toulouse Oliver said.
After introductory remarks, the independent auditor from the Santa Fe-based firm, Zlotnick & Sandoval, began casting the dice. After the dice determine which precincts to examine, the auditors will check the results of the race for the governor’s office, the races for Congressional District 1 and Congressional District 2, and the race for position one of the state’s Supreme Court.
The auditors will compare hand counts of the results in the dice-determined precincts to the machine-tabulated results. And if discrepancies are found, the state may count more ballots by hand to discover the true results of the elections.
According to Toulouse Oliver, that’s never happened in New Mexico. In other words, since at least 2008, the state hasn’t had to go much further than the usual audit process to certify an election.
It will take some time for the full post-election audit to be completed. But, Toulouse Oliver says it’s an important process: “It is yet another way we prove that our elections are accurate, transparent, and accountable,” she said.
