National: Risk-Limiting Audits Can Support an Election’s Legitimacy | StateTech
The National Academy of Sciences report is blunt: “There is no realistic mechanism to fully secure vote casting and tabulation computer systems from cyber threats.” But election officials can and should audit votes — rather than performing time-consuming full recounts — before election results are certified to confirm their legitimacy, the report states. Risk-limiting audits are a relatively new way to double-check the results of an election after the fact. First implemented in Colorado in 2017, the audits examine a randomly chosen, statistically significant number of paper ballots and compare the results in those ballots to the actual result. They’re done no matter the margin of victory; suspicious results may trigger a full recount. “It’s an abbreviated recount, in a sense,” said Ronald Rivest, one of the inventors of the RSA public-key cryptosystem and a member of the NAS panel that wrote the report.