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Voting machines and other election technology in the clerk's office will be the subject of the first of three audits to be conducted soon by the Salt Lake County auditor.
The County Council instructed Auditor Scott Tingley to begin the performance audit of the clerk's election apparatus because the time is approaching when the existing system will have to be replaced — and the council hopes this review will shape future decisions about whether to replace current machines or switch to mail-in balloting or something else.
The election machines also represent a good starting point, Tingley said, because he estimates this audit will take two to three months. Meanwhile, his teams can work on two longer audits — a three- to six-month evaluation of health services at the county jail, and a nine- to 12-month review of the county's Day Reporting Center, which oversees individuals who have been sent to jail for a misdemeanor but are responsible enough to serve part of their sentences in the community.
"We can get the first [audit] in a couple of months, and we'll see how that goes," Councilwoman Aimee Winder Newton said. "After the first one, we have the ability to pull the plug and say 'no way' to keeping going."
Her comment about the council's leeway to revise its audit plan was a response to concerns expressed by two fellow council members, Republican Michael Jensen and Democrat Jim Bradley.
They thought it wiser to have Tingley's office do just one performance audit before the council asks for more — in case the new GOP officeholder's approach doesn't coincide with what council members had in mind.
After all, they added, performance audits have not been conducted for years so the county is venturing into uncharted territory.
But Republican Newton and Democratic Councilman Arlyn Bradshaw countered that whatever tweaks need to be made to Tingley's approach to the election-machine audit can be made easily to the other two reviews without holding them up. This approach also helps the auditor and council see how this simultaneous run of small, medium and large-scale audits functions.
"It's better to do too much and accomplish something than to do too little and accomplish nothing," said Republican Council Chairman Richard Snelgrove, a strong advocate for reviving performance audits that was dormant in the administration of his predecessor, Greg Hawkins.
Before Tingley's work begins in earnest, he must come back to the council with a proposed charter to describe the audits formally and a detailed rundown of his methodology for drafting them.
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