This article was originally posted in the September 16 issue of NCSL’s The Canvas.
Ensuring the accuracy and integrity of the vote count can help generate public confidence in elections. Two of the most important steps happen after voting concludes on Election Day. Ballot accounting and reconciliation (BA&R) is a not-so-exciting name for a crucial best practice. BA&R is a multi-step process that is designed to account for all ballots, whether cast at the polling place or sent in remotely, and compare that with the number of voters who voted, as the first pass. After that, the next step is to ensure that all batches of votes from all the polling places are aggregated into the totals once (and only once). This is a basic “sanity check” that makes sure no ballots are missing, none are found later, none were counted twice, etc. Most jurisdictions do a good job at this task.
Post-election audits enable verification of the voting system’s correct operation regardless of whether a voting system has malfunctioned, suffered an error in ballot programming, or been breached through malfeasance. Audits involve manually checking a representative sample of paper ballots in order to confirm that counting software has functioned correctly.
Good post-election audits are: 1) robust—examining more than just one or two contests; 2) comprehensive—including all types of ballots and voting systems; 3) timely—starting after the initial count is published and ending before results are finalized; 4) transparent and random—auditing an observably random selection of units and ensuring the count itself is observable; and 5) expandable—resolving unexplained discrepancies found in the count. Risk-limiting audits give the highest level of assurance that outcome-changing error can be found, using statistical methods to ensure greatest efficacy.