City of Colby chosen for 2022 election audit
The Colby city board listened to a report on the results of an election audit the city was randomly selected for at their last council meeting. During this audit process, there were no discrepancies found between counts reported by the electronic counting system and counts reported after the ballots were counted by hand during the audit following the November 2022 elections.
Three-hundred sixty-eight reporting units are chosen for the audit, which asks representatives from the units to hand count the votes to find any possible errors that may have occurred during the electronic counting process. Chosen municipalities are picked at random, though there are some considerations given to make sure that the randomly selected municipalities accurately represent all of Wisconsin to prevent all audits being done from one geographic region.
Because the city of Colby was chosen for this audit, representatives of the municipality had to report to the Marathon county courthouse to count and tally ballots for four different races by hand. The four races in question were the positions of governor, attorney general, secretary of state, and the representative of District 69. The ballots under audit were those cast by Colby residents of Marathon county, of which there were 205.
City clerk and treasurer Connie Gurtner and three others made the trip to the county courthouse and manually counted the ballots in a space open to public observation.
After the counting was concluded, it was found that the counts reported by the initial electronic systems and the tallies done by hand during the audit matched exactly.
These post-election audits have been done in Wisconsin since 2006, though the percentage of counties audited has increased recently. In 2020, 184 reporting units were audited in such a manner, but that number was doubled to 368 for the 2022 audit process.
Employee Raises
The board also approved a recommendation from the personnel committeee regarding the wages of city employees. The approved recommendation will increase the wages of city employees by an average approximation of 3.8 percent, or more specifically $1.00 for all employees.
The board also approved an additional day of floating holiday for employees to be used throughout the year rather than locking it in for a specific day.
