EAC - Voluntary Voting System Guidelines

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Post Date : | 9/30/2005
Section Comments
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Comment : | Part one of three Section 6.9 Live auditing techniques are crucial to verify voting system accuracy during the live election. The following proposed addition to the VVSG describes the use of statistical live auditing techniques to verify that paper ballots or paper audit trails match the cast vote records created by the scanning process. 6.9 Requirements for Statistical Live Auditing of Optical-Scan and VVPAT Records =20 When machine-scanned paper records include a unique identifier, strong auditing of the vote interpretation process is possible during the live election via well-known statistical quality control techniques. The technique described here is applicable to optical-scan ballots and voter-verified paper audit trails. To use this audit technique, a unique identifier is imprinted on the election's paper vote records, either at record creation time or during machine scanning. (The latter approach is considered superior, as it avoids anonymity concerns.) When the records are machine-interpreted, the resulting cast vote record is electronically associated with the paper record's unique identifier. A small portion of the paper records are then randomly selected for auditing, and that subset is hand-interpreted by one or more hand-count teams, resulting in a second human-compiled set of cast vote records. The human-compiled cast vote records are compared to the machine-compiled cast vote records, and any discrepancies are investigated. Since the individual paper records are linked to the electronic cast vote records by the unique identifier, this auditing method is very efficient. Medium-to-large counties can be 99% confident that the electronic cast vote records differ from the results of a hypothetical full hand count by less than 1%, by only hand-counting 1,000 ballots. The number of ballots to randomly select to achieve a particular confidence level can be determined by reference to [1], below.