Dear John,
Last week, I drove to Pennsylvania to testify before the Pennsylvania Senate State Government Committee. I was asked to give testimony about the state’s risk-limiting audit pilots, which the Verified Voting audit team and I have been heavily engaged with from planning to implementation.
We know this is the first of multiple hearings on the 2020 election in Pennsylvania, an election that has been certified and concluded, where election security experts like myself agree that we can have justified confidence in the outcomes. If you watch the hearing, you’ll see the politicization of processes like risk-limiting audits (RLAs) that are designed to establish the facts about the election -- which amounts to an attack on the election itself. We can’t let that happen.
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“RLAs are designed to be a transparent, efficient, and cost-effective way for election officials to check the reported election results before the results are certified. When implemented alongside other best practices, RLAs give strong evidence to support the final election outcome and give the public justified confidence that their votes count.”
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As a specialist in RLAs and other post-election audit methods, I’ve been proud to serve as a member of Pennsylvania’s audit work group since early 2019. Our team traveled around the state assisting election officials with the pilot risk-limiting audit of the 2020 presidential election, helped with an RLA pilot of this year's primary, and are already preparing for another pilot in the fall. We also successfully advocated alongside our partners for the passage of the election reform package that gave counties the resources needed to replace insecure voting systems with paper-based systems that make RLAs possible. We’ve come too far to let this progress be derailed by sham reviews and other distractions that only leave our elections less secure.
As I said in my written testimony, “Advice is easy, and solutions are hard.” But the baseless claims about widespread election fraud show just how important it is for us to be working toward scientifically sound solutions in Pennsylvania, and other states around the country facing similar pushes for sham election reviews, and pushing back against the fear and confusion that allow misinformation to thrive. Please consider a donation to help us continue the fight to give voters justified confidence in election outcomes.
With thanks,
Mark Lindeman, Acting Co-Director
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