Colorado Completes Statewide Risk-Limiting Audit
On November 7th, Colorado held its coordinated election for various state and local offices, as well as a statewide initiative addressing property taxes.
To ensure the accuracy and integrity of the election results, the state conducted a risk-limiting audit, a process that has been in place since 2009 and has been hailed by election experts as the highest standard of post-election audits.
The "bipartisan risk-limiting audit" was enacted into law in 2009 and first executed after the 2017 coordinated election. This election’s audit began on Nov. 9.
“This audit is one of many tools my office uses to ensure Colorado’s elections are safe, secure, and accurate,” Griswold stated in a press release.
The purpose of the audit is to check that the ballots were counted in accordance with the intent of the voters who cast them. This is done by manually inspecting a sample of ballots to provide a statistical level of certainty that the election outcome is correct.
"Good post-election audits check the machine results by inspecting some of the paper ballots manually," the overview on the secretary of state's website explains. "Well-designed and executed audits can catch and correct errors that change the outcome - that made someone other than the true winner appear to win."
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The process began with the selection of a race in each county to be audited, including the statewide initiative Proposition HH.
In close races, a larger sample of ballots is examined to ensure that even the slightest discrepancies are caught and corrected. This thorough process ensures that the true winner is declared in all races.
"Risk-limiting audits demand that close races get more scrutiny," Secretary Griswold emphasized in her written statement. "If the margin of victory is wide, fewer ballots need to be reviewed to ensure with high confidence that the outcome is correct - assuming that the audit does not uncover problems."