AuditEngine
Ballot Image Audits for Elections

Reliable elections are essential in any democracy. Accurately and fairly counting the vote is a necessary function. But who can prove that they did that in an absolutely non-partisan way without any mistakes? We always need to check. Elections officials may have the best of intent. But accidental miscounts are widely acknowledged. We also can't rule out that manufacturers and offices can be compromised. Hackers can intrude, even in offline computers, such as through annual updates and at the manufacturer.

Ballot image audits check all votes in all contests, using electronic images of all ballots, created by existing central and precinct scanners. This is the most thorough way to check. AuditEngine provides ballot image audits at low cost.

Traditional batch percentage audits, and Risk Limiting Audits (RLAs) have samples which are too small to check all contests (some only cover one!) Furthermore they depend on paper ballots, and the public can mistrust the locks, seals and security systems. Image audits are becoming more popular, because they can cover all ballots, cover all contests with no sampling error, use data captured at the earliest possible stage, and have low cost. Maryland and South Carolina use them state-wide. Individual counties in California, Colorado, and Florida arrange for them. So do outside groups in Florida, Georgia, and New Jersey

AuditEngine checks election results by recounting every vote on the scanned images of all ballots. These images are created by existing precinct scanners and central election scanners. In states where ballot images are public, political campaigns and citizen groups can arrange for AuditEngine to recount images. In other states, election officials can arrange for AuditEngine to recount images, while keeping them non-public. We do insist that our results be public. If we have pdfs of each ballot style in advance, we can produce an independent count within 24 hours after getting ballot images. AuditEngine runs in highly secure mode in the cloud and uses up to 10,000 computers in parallel to process the ballot images in hours instead of days.

Besides checking the overall counts, AuditEngine reports any differences ballot-by-ballot between its interpretation and the cast vote record (CVR) from the voting system. Election officials and the public can decide ballot-by-ballot which is right, without the cost of hand-counting or examining all the thousands of ballots where both systems agree.