California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed Assembly Bill 2400 into law last month, extending the authority of county election officials to use risk-limiting audits (RLA) until Jan. 1, 2023.
“If computers claim California voters were choosing President Trump by majority instead of Joe Biden, you would want an audit to make sure that's what's actually on the ballot rather than the computer is being hacked and the same thing goes the other way around,” said Andrew Appel, a professor, computer science expert and member of the 2018 National Academy of Sciences' Committee on the Future of Voting: Accessible, Reliable, Verifiable Technology.
“If California’s results are reported for Biden, rather than Trump, you would like to know that's what's really on the ballots. There are other races in the state of California for Congress that you also want to make sure are right.”
A risk-limiting audit is a class of methods using different technology to guarantee that if computers counting ballots are wrong about an outcome, there is a high chance of detecting and correcting it, according to Appel.
“It gives California better protection against the possibility of hacked voting machines than it would have had without the RLAs,” he said.
It used to be that election officials were required, during the official canvass of an election, to conduct a public manual tally of the ballots cast in 1% of the precincts chosen at random.
“If an election official in a county wanted to do the risk-limiting audit, which would be maybe more effective than the 1% audit, they still legally couldn't do it," Appel told the Southern California Record. "The law just allows the counties to do good pilot risk-limiting audits and not be breaking the law in the process.”
Both RLAs and 1% audits involve sampling of certain ballots by hand, Appel said.
“With RLAs, we may use computers to help us calculate how many ballots we need to sample but the actual looking at the ballots is done by hand,” he said. “California is already ahead of many states in having several of its counties doing good risk-limiting audits and this will keep California ahead of many states.”
Under the new law, a participating county is required to perform a partial risk-limiting audit of each cross-jurisdictional contest.
“California is taking very positive steps towards doing more pilot RLAs,” Appel said. “They won't be up to speed for full-scale RLAs in this election but you've got to walk before you can run and this law allows California to walk this year and get closer to full-scale RLAs statewide in future elections. Without this law, they couldn't even do that.”
The prior law would have expired on Jan. 1, 2021, before the next statewide primary election.
“Several states and counties nationwide have been doing pilot audits,” Appel said. “For example, Orange County did some very good pilot audits in the last couple of years but only one or two states, like Colorado, have really gotten past pilot risk-limiting audits to full-scale real risk-limiting audits.”
AB 2400 was introduced by Assemblyman Bill Quirk (D-Hayward) and Newsom signed the legislation Aug. 27.
“The restrictions before the passage of AB 2400 on how you could do a pilot RLA were really discouraging local, California election officials in the counties from being able to do pilot RLAs,” Appel said.