Sarasota supervisor outlines canvassing board duties, ballot handling and new countywide audit

Ron Turner, Sarasota County supervisor of elections, laid out the county’s canvassing, vote-counting and audit processes in a recorded Law in Sarasota interview, describing how staff and the canvassing board handle vote-by-mail envelopes, duplicate ballots and a new automated audit that can review every ballot in the county.

Turner said the county’s canvassing board — composed of a county judge serving as chair, the supervisor of elections and the chair of the county commission or a designated alternate — meets publicly to authorize the staff to begin opening and scanning vote-by-mail ballots and to decide voter-intent questions on ballots that scanners treat as overvotes or damaged. “It’s the legislative, executive, judicial branches of county government that are balanced in the canvassing board,” Turner said.

The explanation matters because Sarasota canvasses many ballots before election day. Turner said staff run signature checks on tens of thousands of vote-by-mail envelopes and perform logic-and-accuracy tests on tabulators in public. Ballots are preprocessed weeks before election day so the county can reconcile “people versus pieces of paper” at the precinct level, he said. Turner described the county’s process…