Post Election Audits

Inyo County is committed to full transparency to uphold the integrity of elections. In Inyo County, all ballots are subject to a post-election audit in each election. These audits are conducted in public and open to observation.

Inyo County conducted a risk limiting audit of seven contests contained wholly within Inyo County, and a manual 1% hand tally on the remainder contests.

The risk-limiting audit (RLA) 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.

In California, when a risk-limiting audit is used, it must confirm that the election results reported by the voting system are 95% likely to be accurate. Unlike the post-election 1% manual tally traditionally used to confirm election results in California, under a risk-limiting audit every ballot cast in the election—regardless of which precinct it was cast in—has an equal chance of being audited.

The Inyo County Elections office uses a combination of permanent full-time staff, along with citizen volunteers, to conduct all audits. The audit board located, retrieved, or observed the location and retrieval of each randomly selected ballot from the appropriate storage container and the audit board verified the seals on the appropriate storage containers. No less than two audit board members and one observer were present with the ballots during the process to ensure the security, confidentiality, chain of custody and integrity of ballots. Audit board members took oaths to follow all laws and procedures to support the audit.

For the RLA portion of the audit, a random seed was generated by rolling a 10 sided die, which was then used to determine which ballots would be selected for the audit. The audit board examined each randomly selected ballot and interpreted the voter markings. After each voter intent determination was made, the audit board entered the information into the software tool supplied by the California Secretary of State. The audit continued until the risk limit was met.

For the 1% manual tally audit, slips of paper were drawn out of a container to determine which precincts would be hand tallied. The audit board consisted of four people. One audit board member called out the vote, a second observed that the correct vote was called, and the two additional members of the audit board hand tallied the results. The audit continued until all randomly selected precincts were hand tallied.

Voter intent was determined by unanimous agreement of the entire audit board and if the audit board could not agree on intent, the elections official arbitrated the issue following the guidelines outlined in California Code of Regulations 20123, et. seq.

All required data was published on this website prior to commencement of the audit, beginning with the random seed and select of the random 1% hand tally precincts at 8:30 am on November 24, 2020 at the Independence Courthouse located at 168 N. Edwards St. Independence, CA 93526, immediately followed by the retrieval of ballots and the audit itself.

All parts of the process were open to public observation. Observers, were asked to follow all public health & safety guidelines and maintain at least 6 foot distance from others. A projector was used so that the ballots are clearly visible to all present.

Contests that will be audited with a Risk Limiting Audit:

The RLA was completed on November 24 at 4:30 pm in one round, with zero discrepancies.

Resources:

Full audit report

Ballot Manifest

Semi-Final 9th Results Report

Chain of Custody Logs

Ballot Contest/Ballot Style key

Ballot Type/Voting Precinct/Regular Precinct key

Cast Vote Records Hash:

http://arlo-e2e-denver-demo.s3-website.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/inyo2020/
% shasum -b -a 256 MANIFEST.json
b4c1ecf91d35f01042e7164ba426a28edd026fe1bb23f7747c6a688425843a7d *MANIFEST.json

Seed:

01685534362931444020

Contests that were subject to the RLA:

Contests that were audited with a traditional 1% hand tally of the precincts:

Semi-Official Results – 9th Report, with results by precinct

Randomly selected precincts

Precincts randomly selected for the 1% hand tally are posted below.

Resources:

Press Release regarding the post election audit, to be conducted on November 24, 2020 and November 25, 2020.

California Secretary of State Risk Limiting Audit Emergency Regulations

Chain of Custody Procedures