Orange County opted to participate in the state’s Risk Limiting Audit (RLA) pilot on June 7 to confirm election results even though the program is discretionary.
The largely Republican enclave has participated in the Secretary of State’s RLA pilot program since the 2020 presidential primary election.
“By doing that additional level of auditing, we believe that it adds another level of confidence in the results that we certify,” said Orange County Registrar of Voters Bob Page.
The RLA program uses a randomly-selected 20-digit seed number to select individual ballots in certain contests and the Registrar of Voters has included 20 of the 56 June 7 statewide direct primary election contests.
“It will mathematically determine how many ballots in each contest that we have to manually count and in a large part that the number of ballots that are needed is based on how close the contest is so if you have a smaller margin between the candidates, the secretary of state’s program will indicate there are more ballots we need to manually count," Page said. "What you're trying to achieve is a mathematical confidence level of 95% that those are accurate."
The RLA occurs in addition to the required one percent manual tally of all precincts.
“The one percent manual tally is a required activity in the canvas, and we cannot certify the results of the election until we complete it so it's part of the normal process,” Page told the Southern California Record. “We've had one candidate ask about the process but at this point, no one has been able to actually submit a written request for a recount because we haven't certified.”
Orange County has a total of 2,179 precincts and election results must be certified within 30 days.
“The registrar of voters does not call races,” Page said. “Once I certify, then I'll take an item to the board of supervisors to ask them to declare the winners and the nominees. I expect that we will certify ahead of that 30-day deadline, which is July 7th.”
If a voting discrepancy is discovered, it would be disclosed in the audit report, according to Page.
"Based on what kind of discrepancy it was, we would mitigate that," he added. "The current staff here at the Registrar of Voters and my deputy director of operations have been here a number of years and none of them can recall any time where any discrepancy that was found in one of the audits impacted the results of the election. There may be a situation where, when you actually pull a ballot and look at it with your eyes, you might see that the person may have a light pencil mark on their ballot that wasn't picked up by the scanner but that wouldn't impact the results."