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| | Name : | N/A | Organization : | N/A | Post Date : | 9/30/2005 |
| Section : | ... | Page no. : | | Line no.: | | Comment : | Part one of three Section 6.9
Live auditing techniques are crucial to verify voting system accuracy
during the live election. The following proposed addition to the VVSG
describes the use of statistical live auditing techniques to verify
that paper ballots or paper audit trails match the cast vote records
created by the scanning process.
6.9 Requirements for Statistical Live Auditing of Optical-Scan and
VVPAT Records
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When machine-scanned paper records include a unique identifier, strong
auditing of the vote interpretation process is possible during the
live election via well-known statistical quality control techniques.
The technique described here is applicable to optical-scan ballots and
voter-verified paper audit trails.
To use this audit technique, a unique identifier is imprinted on the
election's paper vote records, either at record creation time or
during machine scanning. (The latter approach is considered superior,
as it avoids anonymity concerns.) When the records are
machine-interpreted, the resulting cast vote record is electronically
associated with the paper record's unique identifier. A small portion
of the paper records are then randomly selected for auditing, and that
subset is hand-interpreted by one or more hand-count teams, resulting
in a second human-compiled set of cast vote records. The
human-compiled cast vote records are compared to the machine-compiled
cast vote records, and any discrepancies are investigated.
Since the individual paper records are linked to the electronic cast
vote records by the unique identifier, this auditing method is very
efficient. Medium-to-large counties can be 99% confident that the
electronic cast vote records differ from the results of a hypothetical
full hand count by less than 1%, by only hand-counting 1,000 ballots.
The number of ballots to randomly select to achieve a particular
confidence level can be determined by reference to [1], below.
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