Resources

This page contains links to various community resources and public documentation about risk-limiting audits.

These projects represent considerable work done by the election verification community, and we salute the contributors’ time and effort!

If you see something we’ve missed, please let us know via email.

Best Practices & Implementation Guides

• Democracy Fund’s “Knowing It’s Right Part 1: A Practical Guide to Risk-Limiting Audits”
• Democracy Fund’s “Knowing It’s Right Part 2: Risk-Limiting Audit Implementation Workbook”
• Democracy Fund’s “Knowing It’s Right Part 3: Planning & Conducting a Risk-Limiting Pilot”
• Brennan Center’s “Post-election Audits: Restoring Trust in Elections”
• Election Assistance Commission’s “Chain of Custody Best Practices”
• Garland et al.’s “Principles and Best Practices for Post-Election Tabulation Audits”
• Lindeman & Stark’s “A Gentle Introduction to Risk-limiting Audits”
• The National Academies’ “Securing the Vote: Protecting American Democracy”
• Bernhard, M., 2021. Risk-Limiting Audits: A Practical Systematization of Knowledge.

Shorter Reads

• Mark Lindeman’s “What’s an RLA? What Does a Good One Look Like, and Why Would I Care?” from the OSET blog

Documentation from Pilot RLAs

• Orange County, California’s Pilot Audit report (June, 2018)
• Fairfax City, Virginia’s Pilot Audit report (August, 2018)
• Rhode Island’s Pilot Audit report (August, 2019)
• Michigan’s Pilot Audit report (November, 2019)

Documentation from Full RLAs

• Colorado’s Audit Center

RLA Tools

• Philip Stark’s BRAVO Ballot Polling method demonstration website
• Philip Stark’s Ballot Comparison method demonstration website
• Kellie Ottoboni’s SUITE/hybrid method demonstration Jupyter notebook
• Neal McBurnett’s RLA sample size calculator
• Ron Rivest’s ElectionAuditWare on GitHub
• Colorado’s Risk-Limiting Audit software (CORLA) on GitHub
• VotingWorks’ Arlo RLA Tool on GitHub

Oversight, Transparency, & “Auditing the Audit”

• Verified Voting’s “Checking the Paper Record: A Guide for Public Oversight of Tabulation Audits”

Graphics, Visuals, Video, & Presentations

• Verified Voting’s audit process graphic
• Verified Voting’s Differences Between RLA Methods
• Denver8TV’s 3-minute RLA explainer video
• Colorado SoS’s 30-minute RLA video

Archived conference presentations

• MIT Election Data & Science Lab’s event: “Election Audit Summit,” held Dec. 7-8, 2018

Recent Academic Research

• Stark, P.B., 2020. Sets of Half-Average Nulls Generate Risk-Limiting Audits: SHANGRLA, Voting ’20.
• Bernhard, M., A. Halderman, K. Ottoboni, R.L. Rivest, and P.B. Stark, 2019. Bernoulli Ballot Polling: A Manifest Improvement for Risk-Limiting Audits, Voting ‘19 to appear.
• Ottoboni, K., P.B. Stark, M. Lindeman, and N. McBurnett, 2018. Risk-Limiting Audits by Stratified Union-Intersection Tests of Elections (SUITE), to appear in Electronic Voting. E-Vote-ID 2018. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Springer.

Testimony

• Stark, P.B., 2018. An Introduction to Risk-Limiting Audits and Evidence-Based Elections, written testimony prepared for the Little Hoover Commission
• Risk-limiting audit representative group recommendations for CO

Legislation

• For state-by-state post-election audit laws and analysis, see: NCSL’s risk-limiting audit resource page

Endorsements

• American Statistical Association Statement ** Press Release