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TheOfficialACM OP t1_itqywpp wrote

Reply to comment by dr_noiiz in I am the co-author behind ACM’s TechBrief on Election Security: Risk-limiting Audits. Ask me anything about election security! by TheOfficialACM

To be absolutely clear, there is no evidence of any tampering with the 2020 presidential election. We have high confidence that the election outcome was correct.

Here's the crazy part: there's nothing inconsistent with the above statement and saying that there are a number of security weaknesses in our election systems that we need to improve. We'd love to see more states adopt risk-limiting audits (the topic of this post!), which would improve our confidence in their elections. Similarly, it's great that the older generation of paperless electronic voting systems are being replaced with newer machines that use paper ballots. This helps mitigate against the worst risks of malware or tampering with voting systems' software.

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LostMyKarmaElSegundo t1_itrahdp wrote

What about the races that were so far off from the pre-election polling?

No one even thought to audit the Senate race in Maine, because it was a huge margin, but the polls had it much closer.

Wouldn't it make sense to do some sort of audit in those situations?

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TheOfficialACM OP t1_itrcskm wrote

I'm not an expert in polling, but polls have margins of error, and pollsters often make corrections to their raw polling to compensate for demographic differences between their sampled population and what they anticipate the actual electorate might look like. So, for any given poll, there are a bunch of assumptions baked into the numbers, any of which might turn out to be false. In other words, when an election disagrees with a poll, that can be a surprise, but it's not an immediate red flag.

That said, many states have laws that allow for automatic recounts when the margin of victory is small enough (typically under 1%). And we recommend that every state adopt risk-limiting audits (the topic of this post!) for all their elections, as a required procedure.

In a high-margin race, a risk limiting audit requires a very small number of samples in order to provide convincing evidence of the correctness of the outcome, so RLAs would be a great thing to adopt.

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rugratsallthrowedup t1_its4dzs wrote

People lie to pollsters

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GalironRunner t1_itseims wrote

More then that who's being asked who's asking AND how something is asked can change a poll. You could write questions down and expect the same answers from anyone that reads it vs reading it to them as in that case the answer can charge based on how you ask it and even based on where you put emphasis on different words which can change how someone interprets the question.

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rugratsallthrowedup t1_ittnjyr wrote

I can also see a situation where the pollster calls, one person picks up the phone, the other resident asks who is calling and then proceeds to hang around, so the person on the phone changes their answers due to social pressure

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Natanael_L t1_itshtck wrote

Also where they ask, they need to get a representative sample to make an accurate prediction

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dr_noiiz t1_itrcxhm wrote

Thank you for the response :) I'll read up more on risk-limiting audits!

I'm glad to hear that a security expert such as yourself is not concerned with non-credible "evidence" and is more focused on eliminating vulnerabilities before they are exploited. I imagine you could talk at length about 2020 but I'll leave it at that!

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