Nobody had requested the audit. It ran because state law requires a small percentage of precincts to be hand-recounted after every election, win or lose, close or not.
The discrepancy it found was tiny: four ballots, one precinct, a transcription slip that changed nothing about the outcome. But the discovery reopened a debate that had nothing to do with those four ballots and everything to do with how counts get checked at all.
A small number, a large argument
Officials on both sides agree the system caught its own error exactly as designed. Where they disagree is what that proves: one camp calls it evidence the process works; the other calls it evidence for recounting more precincts, not fewer.
The clerk who ran the audit says the four-ballot gap is, if anything, reassuring — small enough to be human error, caught early enough to fix before anyone but the auditors ever saw it.