State Elections Enforcement Commission (SEEC) officials failed to complete 92% of 2022 election cycle audits on time, a recent review found. This was one of eight noteworthy findings that the Connecticut Auditors of Public Accounts identified in its recent report on the SEEC, which reviewed the 2022 and 2023 fiscal years.
The SEEC was supposed to complete 106 post-election reviews of campaign committees before the statutorily required due date for candidate committees in the 2024 general elections. They only completed eight of them.
This is the third time that an audit of the SEEC has found that the Commission failed to complete post-election audits on time.
The state auditors also found, when reviewing seven candidate committee commission audits from the 2020 general elections, that the SEEC issued four Final Summary of Examination reports between 132 and 454 days late. An additional review of eight candidate committee commission audits from 2022 found that none of the eight reports had been issued as of Oct. 9, 2024.
“We disagree with the finding in part,” the SEEC wrote in response to this finding. “Due to staffing shortages and changes in the termination date for selected candidate committees chosen for audit, the staff has less than six months to obtain records and information controlled by committees. Once received they must commence post-election reviews in this short time frame both before the start of the new election cycle as well as prior to the statutory prohibition on the release of audits prior to an election.”
These were not the only instances where SEEC officials failed to issue reports on time.
SEEC officials are required to complete five different types of statutory reports. Some of the deadlines for these are at the end of a fiscal year, others are at the end of a calendar year or after an election, and one of these reports is only filed in years where there are state elections. These reports contain information about complaints the Commission investigated, various updates on the status of the Citizens’ Election Fund (CEP), and activities that occurred during a fiscal year.
Ahead of this audit, the SEEC officials were required to submit eight reports to auditors, but they only sent two of them. They were missing at least one report from each of the five categories.
Auditors a determined that “the lack of reporting compliance appears to be the result of managerial inaction and lack of staff,” and have previously found issues with missing reports in the last five audits of the SEEC.
“We agree with the finding in part,” the SEEC responded to this finding. “The agency has been delayed in the past due to staffing shortages and competing obligations. The staffing shortages are permanent in nature. The agency has appointed an individual staff attorney as our Information Policy Coordinator to mitigate this finding. His duties include coordinating and prioritizing all required reports.”
In addition to issues with completing reports on time, auditors also found multiple problems with documentation and record keeping. The problems ranged from not preapproving 87% of overtime hours to having an out-of-date software library.
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Looks like 1 they actually have to work and have no clue how to, or 2 they are covering up voter fraud.
Well if they are like all the other state agenc they probably have way too many supervisors and not enough people to do the job!