SANTA ANA, CA - Orange County will conduct a risk-limiting audit beginning Monday, June 11, 2018. The ballot polling audit is not required under California law and is being conducted as a pilot to refine our approaches to risk-limiting audits.

The risk-limiting audit is a procedure that provides strong statistical evidence that the election outcome is correct, or has a high probability of correcting an outcome that wouldn't match a full hand count of the ballots. The audit itself requires human beings to examine and verify more ballots in close contests and fewer ballots in contests with wider margins.

Quote by Registrar of Voters Neal Kelley

"Conducting a risk-limiting audit is an excellent way to audit elections and provide an important check on the integrity of the election process." He continued, “This is a valuable opportunity to collect useful data on the process of conducting a risk-limiting audit, while at the same time ensuring that the outcomes are true and correct.”

The risk limit for this ballot polling audit has been set at 20%. This means that at a minimum there is an 80% chance that the audit would correct an incorrect outcome.

Prior to the commencement of the risk-limiting audit the Registrar of Voters will establish the random seed for use with the audit software’s random number generator.

The seed is a number consisting of at least 20 digits, and each digit will be selected in order by sequential rolls of a 10-sided die. The Registrar of Voters will randomly select members of the public who attend the audit process to take turns rolling the die and designate one or more staff members to take turns rolling the die in the event that no members of the public are present.

Establishing the seed in this manner results in a properly random, and verifiable, selection of individual ballots for examination and audit, and ensures the integrity and statistical validity of the risk-limiting audit.

The Registrar of Voters will publish the election results to be audited, along with a cryptographic hash of their contents, prior to the seed ceremony, and will publish the seed on its website immediately after it is established.

WHEN: 

• Monday, June 11, 2018 - 11:00am (random seed selected by the rolling of 10-sided die)

WHERE:

• Registrar of Voters, 1300 South Grand Avenue, Building C, Santa Ana, CA

HOW:

• Once the random seed is established the physical pulling of the actual ballots will take place and the manual hand count will begin.