Scan, Shuffle, Rescan: Machine-Assisted Election Audits With Untrusted Scanners

ePrint Report: Scan, Shuffle, Rescan: Machine-Assisted Election Audits With Untrusted Scanners

Douglas W. Jones, Sunoo Park, Ronald L. Rivest, Adam Sealfon

We introduce a new way to conduct post-election audits using untrusted scanners. Audits perform statistical hypothesis testing to confirm election outcomes. However, existing approaches are costly and laborious for close elections—often the most important cases to audit—requiring extensive hand inspection of ballots. We instead employ automated consistency checks, augmented by manual checks of only a small number of ballots. …

audits election eprint report machine scan scanners untrusted