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Editor’s Note: This story is part of Cascadia Daily News’ mini-series “pre-bunking” misinformation and disinformation ahead of the 2024 election. The series will continue to explore the democratic process in Whatcom County.
The Whatcom County elections team wrapped up the primary election risk-limiting audit in about 15 minutes on Wednesday, Aug. 14.
The audit — one of the many election-integrity measures required by law in Washington state — is designed to look for evidence that would cause election officials to doubt the results presented by the voting system.
“This specific risk-limiting audit was statewide so the amount of ballots pulled by Whatcom County was low,” Whatcom County Auditor Stacy Henthorn said.
Only one contest is randomly selected by the Office of Secretary of State in the audit. This time it was the governor’s race. Whatcom County was instructed to pull four ballots. Statewide, 200 were selected.
“The audit sample size depends on the number of ballots available to audit and the margin of victory in the contest to be audited,” Henthorn said.
In its essence, the audit examines a statistical number of randomly-selected paper ballots and compares them to the machine count. In this way, it’s possible to ensure that the winner won with a high level of confidence, according to information provided by the Secretary of State Office.
On Wednesday, the software used gave election workers a list of four specific ballots to be audited. Staff then located each ballot, swapped the ballot out with a brightly-colored replacement sheet and marked the ballot with a label that included the same information as the sheet.
Staff then manually entered the voter choice from the paper ballot into the system, which was compared to the vote originally tabulated.
“The results of the hand count matched the machine count, so there were no discrepancies,” Henthorn said.
For this process, the risk limit was set to 5%. This means the audit has a 95% or better chance of correcting an incorrect outcome if it exists. A risk limit of 5% gives election staff a “high level of confidence with maximum efficiency,” according to the Secretary of State Office.
“A successful risk-limiting audit confirms the winner would be the same even if we had counted all the ballots by hand,” Henthorn said.
Isaac Stone Simonelli is CDN’s enterprise/investigations reporter; reach him at isaacsimonelli@cascadiadaily.com; 360-922-3090 ext. 127.
