Abstract
The theory of risk-limiting audits is well-understood, at least mathematically. Such audits serve to create confidence in the reported election outcome by checking the evidence created during the election. When election officials introduce election technologies into the voting process, it is best to do this after the appropriate auditing framework has been implemented. In this paper, we describe our experiences with piloting a risk-limiting audit of a referendum that was held in Denmark on December 3, 2015. At the time of the publication of this paper, Denmark’s election law did not permit electronic voting technologies to be used during voting allowing us to study auditing in isolation.
Our findings are that (1) risk-limiting audits also apply to paper and pencil elections; (2) election officials usually support risk-limiting audits even if no voting technologies are used because these audits can improve the efficiency of the manual count; (3) that practical and organizational challenges must be overcome to keep audits repeatable, in particular it must be possible to identify individual ballots repeatedly and reliably; (4) it is possible to arrange an audit for the result of an earlier stage in a count during a later stage, for example, an audit of the rough count results fine count; and (5) that whenever the electronic voting technologies are considered, auditing should be considered as part of feasibility study.
C. Schürmann—This publication was made possible in part by the DemTech grant 10-092309 from the Danish Council for Strategic Research, Program Commission on Strategic Growth Technologies and in part by NPRP Grant #7-988-1-178 from the Qatar National Research Fund (a member of Qatar Foundation). The statements made herein are solely the responsibility of the authors.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
Lindeman, M., Stark, P.B.: A gentle introduction to risk-limiting audits. IEEE Secur. Priv. 10(5), 42–49 (2012)
McBurnett, N.: State of colorado, risk-limiting audit final report, post-election audit initiative grant no. eac110150e. http://bcn.boulder.co.us/~neal/elections/corla/Risk-Limiting_Audit_Report-Final_20140331.pdf
Stark, P.B.: Super-simple simultaneous single-ballot risk-limiting audits. In: Conference on Electronic Voting Technology/Workshop on Trustworthy Elections (EVT/WOTE), pp. 1–16 (2010)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2017 Springer International Publishing AG
About this paper
Cite this paper
Schürmann, C. (2017). A Risk-Limiting Audit in Denmark: A Pilot. In: Krimmer, R., et al. Electronic Voting. E-Vote-ID 2016. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10141. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-52240-1_12
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-52240-1_12
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-52239-5
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-52240-1
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)