Voter Perceptions of Trust in Risk-Limiting Audits

TL;DR

This study investigates how risk-limiting audits (RLAs) impact voter confidence, revealing that smaller audit samples can decrease trust, and offers recommendations to improve public perception of RLAs.

Contribution

The paper provides empirical evidence that smaller audit samples in RLAs can reduce voter confidence and suggests strategies to enhance public trust in election audits.

Findings

Participants felt less confident with smaller audit samples.

Larger audit samples increased voter trust.

Recommendations for improving RLA communication.

Abstract

Risk-limiting audits (RLAs) are expected to strengthen the public confidence in the correctness of an election outcome. We hypothesize that this is not always the case, in part because for large margins between the winner and the runner-up, the number of ballots to be drawn can be so small that voters lose confidence. We conduct a user study with 105 participants resident in the US. Our findings confirm the hypothesis, showing that our study participants felt less confident when they were told the number of ballots audited for RLAs. We elaborate on our findings and propose recommendations for future use of RLAs.