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Confirming Election Results with Risk-Limiting Audits


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Key to any audit’s success is the availability of paper ballots to confirm the machine counts, according to the study.

Credit: Getty Images

Rice University's Dan Wallach, working with Matthew Bernhard at nonprofit VotingWorks, found risk-limiting audits (RLAs) can be used to confirm election outcomes.

Bernhard said RLAs offer "a high degree of accuracy and transparency without the enormous undertaking that is counting every contest on every ballot by hand."

The researchers said most scenarios would fit one of three RLA levels.

Ballot comparison audits, described as most efficient and precise, involve paper ballots being individually numbered by the ballot scanner, so auditors can verify the corresponding electronic record.

Less-precise are ballot-polling audits, which compare a random sample of ballots to electronic totals, and batch comparison audits, which compare groups of ballots.

From Rice University News
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Abstracts Copyright © 2022 SmithBucklin, Washington, DC, USA


 

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