Statewide Election Audit Begins

Liz Gullett

Jan 15, 2021

This past Monday, the Department of State, in cooperation with county and local election officials, began the process of conducting the statewide risk-limiting audit of the November 2020 general election. The first step in the process involves using a random number, generated by rolling 20 ten-sided dice, to plug into the auditing software to randomly select ballots that will be pulled from any one of the 1,520 local election jurisdictions and hand-reviewed. More than 18,000 ballots are expected to be retrieved in over half of the state’s election jurisdictions. Following the random number generation, clerks will have two weeks to draw the corresponding ballots and review them. Once the process has been completed in each county, the department will announce the results of the comparison between the randomly selected hand-reviewed ballots and the statewide machine-tabulated totals.

Risk limiting audits are used to confirm the accuracy of ballot tabulation machines, by comparing the results from the hand count of the randomly selected paper ballots to the previously printed results from the machines.

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