HOW ELECTION RESULTS ARE CHECKED
Colorado’s Risk Limiting Audit
After each Election Day, but before election results are certified, all Colorado counties conduct a Risk Limiting Audit to verify that the tabulation system counted ballots correctly. Colorado was the first state to conduct a statewide Risk Limiting Audit in 2017. These audits are now considered national best practices for ensuring voting system accuracy because they compare hardcopy paper ballots to the electronic record of how the system counted those ballots.
HOW IT WORKS
A set of races and issues are selected. The selection always includes one statewide race and one county or local race.
The amount of ballots to audit is determined by an equation that includes the difference in votes between the winning and losing candidate divided by the total number of ballots counted.
Once the number of ballots to audit is determined, the actual ballots to audit are randomly selected.
Bi partisan teams enter all votes on all selected ballots into Colorado’s audit tool, which then compares the voter’s choices with machine counted record.
If the entire batch of ballots checked have a 97% accuracy rate or higher, the county passes the audit.
If the entire batch of ballots pulled do not reach the 97% accuracy rate or higher, a second batch of ballots are pulled. Bi partisan teams continue to pull batches of ballots for each failed round until the 97% accuracy rate is achieved or all ballots cast are audited.
Why might a county have issues during an audit?
There are many reasons that discrepancies may occur. The most common reason is that the audit board retrieved a different ballot than the one required by the software, and therefore reported the wrong voter choices. Another common reason for a discrepancy is that the audit board made a mistake when inputting the voter choices into the software. Counties take seriously the results of these audits. Since they were begun in 2017, no discrepancies were found that were the product of the voting system not accurately recording a voter’s intent.
Colorado Secretary of State’s Office has a library of results for all counties.