3% audits...

Can someone give me a short summation of the process and value of 3 percent audits?

The same for parallel testing would also be appreciated.
Thanks,
Melissa

It's not a simple answer.


http://www.votersunite.org/info/auditingissues.asp


http://www.votersunite.org/info/RandomSample.mov






.

has the best audit language and I just wanted a short explanation of why they thought that was so. 3 percent auditing seems to get flung around here quite a bit.
Thanks,
Melissa

A fixed audit may or may not catch a problem, Especially so, in races with the closest margins or not a lot of precincts. Duh! In some cases it audits more than necessary. In others not enough. On average, for the same money over time, a risk based audit would do a much better job. But actually, in NJ, a 2% minimum is required if calculations don't call for a larger audit.

Jersey's Risk Based Audit will factor a number of variables, including the margin, number of votes, number of precincts, etc., and based on that calculate the number of precincts you'd have to corrupt in order to overturn an election. (It assumes that a precinct with more than 20% of the vote stolen would be noticed and added to those randomly audited.) The independent state auditing board created by the law can impose stricter conditions, too.

But the KEY factor required by this law, and figuring in the calculation, is the confidence level that a full recount would not change the result of the election (99% for statewide and federal (very good), but only 90% (not as good) for state legislature).

Comparing a fixed audit to a risk-based audit reveals the importance of the latter's implementation in any election regardless of the voting system (as long as it's auditable) used.

:hi:

I like the phrase 'risk based, post election audits'. Wish I'd had it before I submitted my language, but I'll try and get it in later. I received an excellent answer to my question from a person who worked on the the NJ audits. If I get permission, I'll repost it here.

Thanks to everyone for their invaluable assistance! :yourock: :grouphug:

who has this Nifty Blog, that should definitely be one of the Most Popular sites on the Internet ;)

http://e-voter.blogspot.com/

Here was Howard's excellent response to my query.

Hi Melissa,

I agree that 3% is an arbitrary figure, but see below.

Parallel testing and post-election audits are apples and oranges. If you don't have anything to audit, such as voter-verified paper ballots, then there is no recourse other than to randomly select machines to be tested during an election to see if they count the votes correctly. This is known as parallel testing but it would still require some kind of voter-verified paper records of the votes cast to test the machines to see if they are counted correctly. These would either have to be kept secret if they are produced before the tests begin (so that no one will be able to program the machine to count these particular combinations of votes correctly), or generated randomly at the time the testing is done (so they cannot be predicted). If the machines do not count these votes correctly, there may be no recourse anyway since the testing is done during the election and any flaws in the remaining untested machines would still be present. DREs are of course especially vulnerable to this sort of thing, and they are the only e-voting systems that would not be auditable in the first place (assuming they do not produce VVPATs).

The other thing about parallel testing is that for the tests to really be statistically accurate, they would have to follow the same rules as sampling machines or precincts in an audit after the election. The difference is, with the audit, we know the amount of discrepancies we are looking for: it's the number of switched or uncounted votes that would change the outcome of the election reported by the voting system. With parallel testing, we don't even know this number because the election is still underway. So it's hard to come up with the right number of machine to test, although we could probably test enough to rule out some percentage of faulty machines such as 1%, 5%, etc. The problem is, there could be trouble with some ballot styles that might not affect others, and it's impossible to test all vote combinations. It might be possible to test every ballot style though, so that might be a better idea. The best thing that can be said about this kind of testing is that it might serve as a deterrent to deliberate tampering with the machines, but it doesn't do much to confirm the true winners of elections in my opinion.

As far as a 3% audit, or any percentage audit, it's not the percentage that matters, but rather the number of machines audited. So I agree that it's arbitrary. 3% may be very effective for a statewide race because it's a lot of machines, whereas 3% may be inadequate for smaller contests such as US House or members of a State Legislature where 3% would NOT involve many machines, or when the victory margin in any contest is narrow.

If you are interested in learning more about this, I'd suggest you read the paper on this subject available on Verified Voting's website:http://www.verifiedvotingfoundation.org/auditcomparison There are 2 versions, one of which was recently published in the peer-reviewed journal, "The American Statistician."The longer one, entitled "Percentage-based versus SAFE Vote Tabulation Auditing: A Graphic Comparison" is written for a more general audience. I'd be happy to answer any questions about this work.

I would say that generally speaking, a properly conducted 3% audit of a large state would be quite effective, but this depends on the victory margin of the statewide contest. It would be better to use a smaller minimum such as 2%, or even 1% in the largest state, with the ability to automatically increase the initial sample size based on the closeness of the race without any cap on that sample size, and with additional requirements for escalating the audit if errors are found. In the Verified Voting paper, we show that an audit of about 3.5% of precincts nationwide would have been enough to confirm the outcomes of ALL federal elections from 2002-2006, assuming no discrepancies were found and assuming there were no caps on the size of the initial sample for close races, a few of which would have required full automatic recounts.

The audit law we wrote for the State of NJ requires all this. You can read about that on my blog if you scroll down past the NY lawsuit article:http://e-voter.blogspot.com/

Hope this helps. Let me know if you need any other information. There are some newer, but slightly more complicated methods in the works that audit larger precincts more often than smaller ones, while still maintaining a truly random sample, that are very attractive.

Regards,
Howard (Stanislevic)

And if anyones asks, yes, I am also concerned about the chain of custody of the paper ballots. But, if we don't hand count a large enough sample of those ballots, even a perfect chain of custody will not confirm the winner of an election. So we have to work on both of these problems but I think the sampling problem may need more attention because it's less obvious and not as well understood.

Also, you may want to read and share this because it shows that the e-vote counting problem could have been solved over 30 years ago!:
"Electronic Vote Counting: Where Did We Go Wrong? "By Howard Stanislevic, VoteTrustUSA E-Voter Education Project November 21, 2006http://www.votetrustusa.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=2067&Itemid=26

Regards,
Howard (Stanislevic)

BTW, you can read about parallel testing in the Brennan Center's Machinery of Democracy report. You could always google and cite that if you want as more of a permanent record.
HS

Thank You, Howard! :yourock:

Just so everyone (or anyone willing to read my posts ;) ) knows -- the basic idea behind the confidence levels is to assume that in fact the apparent winner did not win, and to make the probability of detecting that fact at least 99% or 90%. (Of course that makes some assumptions. For instance, if the paper trail is junk, then all bets are off. This is statistics, not magic.)

I mention this because sometimes someone thinks the percentages mean that 1%-10% of elections will be stolen with impunity. Hypothetically that might be true, but it certainly isn't what the percentages mean.

It is based on the premises already stated that if the election has been decided by only a few percentage points, the % of precincts audited should be larger than if the election has been decided by a higher percentage.

Kathy has presented the Election Archive model on a number of different occasions to a number of different commissions and boards and whatnot, without much success to date, but it certainly makes as much sense as any of the other methods proposed.

Here's a link to her proposal:

http://electionarchive.org/ucvAnalysis/US/paper-audits/VoteCountAudits-PPMEB.pdf

Whatever is decided on has to be better than what we have now, which is almost uniformly faith-based elections with no verification at all.

I don't know about Kathy presenting "The Election Archive Model(s)(c)(sic)" on a number of different occasions, but she has published a number of different models. Seems the MO is dissing other people's work, then copying it, and then playing with the copyright dates to make it appear her work proceeded theirs.

In this case, she claims a 2007 "copyright"(c)(sic) while citing Aslam, Popa, and Rivest whose paper was not published until 2008.

Now, by "presented" do you mean repeatedly showing up and making a scene at national election reform events? She's needlessly knocked herself out of the loop.

called for greater percentages of audit than others, but I guess I'm not paying close enough attention.

I don't think you can have too many people working on election reform, tho, and I'm favor of shameless plagiarism by one and all, as long as we can restore democracy. I personally don't care who gets the credit.

She's reaaranging a few bits here and there making no particular improvement and a lot of noise.

Agreed that you can't "have too many people working on election reform". But don't confuse "shameless plagiarism" with working on election reform.

Creating a ruckus is also not working on election reform, it disruptive. Ask anyone directly subjected to her behavior.

I don't think you're "not paying close enough attention", Steve. But I certainly encourage you to get out a little more. :D