When Audits and Recounts Distract from Election Integrity: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election in Georgia

Abstract

Georgia was central to efforts to overturn the 2020 Presidential election, including a call from then-president Trump to Georgia Secretary of State Raffensperger asking Raffensperger to `find' 11,780 votes. Raffensperger has maintained that a `100% full-count risk-limiting audit' and a machine recount agreed with the initial machine-count results, which proved that the reported election results were accurate and that `no votes were flipped.' There is no indication of widespread fraud, but there is reason to distrust the election outcome: the two machine counts and the manual `audit' tallies disagree substantially, even about the number of ballots cast. Some ballots in Fulton County were included in the original count at least twice; some were included in the machine recount at least thrice. Audit results for some tally batches were omitted from the reported audit totals. The two machine counts and the audit were not probative of who won because of poor processes and controls: a lack of secure physical chain of custody, ballot accounting, pollbook reconciliation, and accounting for other election materials such as memory cards. Moreover, most voters voted with demonstrably untrustworthy ballot-marking devices, so even a perfect handcount or audit would not necessarily reveal who really won. True risk-limiting audits (RLAs) and rigorous recounts can limit the risk that an incorrect electoral outcome will be certified rather than being corrected. But no procedure can limit that risk without a trustworthy record of the vote. And even a properly conducted RLA of some contests in an election does not show that any other contests in that election were decided correctly. The 2020 U.S. Presidential election in Georgia illustrates unrecoverable errors that can render recounts and audits `security theater' that distract from the more serious problems rather than justifying trust.