Dear John,
As Verified Voting’s Senior Policy Associate, I assist election officials across the country with risk-limiting audits and audit pilots. A few weeks ago, my travels took me to Williams County, Ohio. Not only did I guide their election officials through the audit process in preparation for future elections, I also met representatives from other counties looking to provide their voters with similar evidence-based means of checking election results.
Success stories like Williams County are happening in more and more parts of the country. But so are calls for sham election reviews that don’t follow any evidence-based best practices, don’t offer a transparent look at the process, and could even leave voting systems less secure than when they started.
Take my home state of Pennsylvania for example – we’ve traveled throughout the state assisting election officials with implementing risk-limiting audits, even as partisan legislators launch their own sham election review. My colleague Mark Lindeman said in a recent interview: “What’s extraordinary about what’s increasingly happening around the country — and the sort of bandwagon that Pennsylvania seems to be climbing on — is it’s not routine, there are no defined procedures, and even the objectives, beyond airing grievances and paranoid fantasies about the 2020 election, are radically unclear.”
We can’t and won’t allow those sham reviews to become the norm. Ensuring our elections are secure, accurate, and verifiable isn’t and shouldn’t be about red versus blue or who’s on the ballot. It’s about making sure voters can have justified confidence in the results by having paper ballots to examine, strong chain of custody procedures to keep ballots safe, and routine, robust audits to provide a statistically sound check that all votes have been counted as cast. Verified Voting has been working toward that goal for over 15 years, and we’re not about to stop now.
Please consider a contribution today, so we can push back against the politicization of audits and help election officials stay focused on the work that matters most: keeping our elections – and our democracy – running.
With thanks,
Chrissa LaPorte, Senior Policy Associate
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