A complete evaluation of the post-election audits in seven swing states in 2024 discovered that the majority don’t meet baseline circumstances to offer evidence-based election outcomes, nor are they enough to behave as safeguard in opposition to potential errors or tampering.
A brand new report co-authored by Susan Greenhalgh, Senior Advisor on Election Safety for Free Speech For Individuals, and Dr. David Jefferson, a nationally-recognized laptop scientist, examined the post-election audits carried out in 2024 in seven swing states to be able to take into account if the audits supplied sturdy proof to affirm the pc generated election outcomes. The report discovered that in most states the audits are inadequate, inadequately documented, and/or premature, and are unable to offer sturdy proof of the correctness of election outcomes. Although most audits had been discovered to be missing, the report states that, in itself, this doesn’t point out or counsel the election outcomes had been manipulated.
The report discusses the safety dangers inherent with recording and counting votes by laptop that compel the conduct of strong, pre-certification, post-election audits of paper ballots, primarily marked by hand by the voter. It additionally debunks prevalent misconceptions about computerized election system safety that will diminish the perceived want for audits. The report states, “Regardless of the generally repeated assurances that voting tools can’t be manipulated, it may be. Though there are not any verified circumstances of technical voting methods hacks within the U.S. that succeeded in altering the vote counts, the myths that voting methods are unhackable don’t stand as much as critical scrutiny. All election outcomes counted by computer systems needs to be verified with significant, well timed, strong, public, and binding post-election audits primarily based on a dependable, voter-verified document of the voters’ picks.”
The report additionally discusses the voting system breaches that occurred in 2020-2022, during which partisan operatives tied to the Trump marketing campaign accessed voting tools and/or software program from the 2 largest voting system distributors. The report argues that the unauthorized entry to voting methods escalated the safety dangers to the election and amplified the necessity for sturdy audits.
The report examines important properties of efficient post-election audits and “risk-limiting audits” to be able to evaluate the audits carried out within the seven swing states. It discovered that some states don’t conduct or publish audit outcomes till well-after the election, which negates any potential for the audit to trigger a well timed investigation into errors or to appropriate a potential incorrect end result. Some states present little proof of the audit itself, providing solely an opaque abstract. The three swing states that declare to carry out “risk-limiting audits,” Georgia, Nevada and Pennsylvania, don’t adjust to the requisite circumstances for true “risk-limiting audit.”
The report discovered that, “General, the audits carried out had been insufficient to offer sturdy proof to substantiate the computer-generated outcomes supplied by the election tools used, a lot of which is working software program that has been misappropriated and distributed to partisan actors. Though we don’t dispute the result of the 2024 presidential election, we discover that the audits within the swing states didn’t present the mandatory sturdy proof of its correctness that the general public deserves.”
The complete report could be accessed right here.
