WASHINGTON, July 16 — The machinery of election security in the United States does not depend on sophisticated software or real-time monitoring of voting machines. Instead, the technical foundation rests on something far simpler: a stack of paper ballots and a statistical process known as a risk-limiting audit, or RLA.
An RLA is a post-election auditing procedure designed to limit the risk that the reported outcome in an election contest is incorrect. The process involves storing voter-verified paper ballots securely until they can be checked, then manually examining a statistical sample of those paper ballots until enough evidence is gathered to meet a predetermined risk limit. Under the hood, the procedure is straightforward: election officials hand-count a statistically determined sample of voter-verified paper ballots. If the sample confirms the outcome, the audit stops.
If it suggests the result could be wrong, the audit escalates, ultimately to a full hand count of every ballot. The detail that matters is that the sample size is tied directly to the margin of victory.
A wider margin means a smaller sample; a razor-thin race means officials count more ballots by hand. This mathematical relationship is what lets an RLA provide strong statistical assurance while hand-counting far fewer ballots than a full recount. The method is widely considered the gold standard of post-election audits, and it explains why paper ballots matter so much for election confidence.
Paper Ballots and the Security Community
Risk-limiting audits depend on the existence of voter-verified paper records, which is why the security community pairs the two. Without a paper ballot that the voter has confirmed, there is no independent record to audit against a machine tally.
The method is endorsed across the ideological spectrum, including by the American Statistical Association, the Brennan Center for Justice, Common Cause, the League of Women Voters and Verified Voting. That list spans groups from the left-leaning Brennan Center to the good-government nonpartisan League of Women Voters, a breadth of support that is itself a data point worth noting. Adoption varies by state, as ever with US election administration. A handful of states require risk-limiting audits; others run pilots.
Pennsylvania, for example, conducted statewide RLAs including for its April 2024 presidential primary. Some states are phasing in progressively stricter risk limits over successive elections, tightening the statistical confidence threshold as they gain experience with the process.
Advantages of an RLA include that samples can be small and inexpensive if the margin of victory is large; there are options for the public to watch and verify each step; and errors found in any step lead to corrective actions, including larger samples, up to a 100% hand count if needed. Disadvantages include that the sample needs to be a large fraction of all ballots to minimize the chance of missing mistakes, if any contest is close; and it is hard to check computer totals publicly, except by releasing computer records to the public.
What the Audit Actually Catches
The practical takeaway is that paper ballots combined with risk-limiting audits let officials detect and correct tabulation errors or tampering. As with other election audits, the goal is to identify not only intentional alterations of ballots and tallies, but also bugs in election machines, such as software errors, scanners with blocked sensors or scanners skipping some ballots. The approach does not assume that all ballots, contests or machines were handled the same way, in which case spot checks could suffice.
The sample sizes are designed to have a high chance of catching even a brief period when a scratch or fleck of paper blocks one sensor of one scanner, or a bug or hack switches votes in one precinct or one contest, if these problems affect enough ballots to change the result. An RLA is not a recount — it is a statistical check designed to catch a wrong outcome before it becomes official.
If the audit escalates to a full hand count, that is not a failure of the system; it is the system working exactly as designed, consuming more manual labor to resolve the uncertainty the sample flagged. If examining sampled ballots shows flaws in ballot storage, the usual approach cannot recover correct results, and researchers recommend a re-vote if the number of ballots held in flawed storage is enough to change winners.
An alternative to re-votes is to create and verify backups of the paper ballots soon after they are voted, so there is an alternative to flawed storage of the original ballots. There are three general types of risk-limiting audits.
Depending on the circumstances of the election and the auditing method, different numbers of ballots need to be hand-checked. For example, in a jurisdiction with 64,000 ballots tabulated in batches of 500 ballots each, an 8% margin of victory, and allowing no more than 10% of any mistaken outcomes to go undetected, method 1, ballot comparison, on average requires hand-checking a certain number of ballots. Comparisons can be done ballot-by-ballot or precinct-by-precinct, though the latter is more expensive.
The variation in state adoption means that a voter in Pennsylvania has stronger post-election statistical assurance than a voter in a state that has not yet run an RLA pilot. What to watch next is whether more states move from pilots to requirements, and whether the phasing-in of stricter risk limits continues.
The technical reality is that RLAs work only where paper ballots exist, so the push for paper trails and the push for risk-limiting audits are the same push. The gold standard is not theoretical — it is a hand count of a statistically determined sample, escalating if necessary, and it is already running in statewide elections.
Sources
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