Audit Sampling Program

The Federal Election Comission (FEC) had been using the same program for almost twenty years to monitor contributions and expenditures for all federal elections. The program required a special operating system and trained programmers to operate it; in short, it was fast becoming an unusable dinosaur of a program. By partnering with Bardwell Consulting, who specialize in statistics, rusted code was able translate the old program into a vastly improved web-based application while ensuring that the accuracy of the old system was retained. Each of the old Fortran and BASIC files were translated into PHP and a complete Audit Sampling Program (ASP) was created using the Zend Framework.

ASP allows auditors to take a random sample from any Excel or CSV file and then evaluate the results of the audit. One of the exciting new features that was implemented is the ability for auditors to search for duplicate entries in any data file by utilizing phonetic search algorithms and levenshtein distance. This represents a major step forward for the FEC in terms of usability and efficiency, and will help to ensure a thorough and accurate election auditing process.

 

About the Company

In 1975, Congress created the Federal Election Commission (FEC) to administer and enforce the Federal Election Campaign Act (FECA) - the statute that governs the financing of federal elections. The duties of the FEC, which is an independent regulatory agency, are to disclose campaign finance information, to enforce the provisions of the law such as the limits and prohibitions on contributions, and to oversee the public funding of Presidential elections.