Voter Perceptions of Trust in Risk-Limiting Audits
This addresses a critical issue for election integrity and public trust, but it is incremental as it builds on existing RLA research by testing a specific hypothesis.
The study tackled the problem that risk-limiting audits (RLAs) might not always boost public confidence in election outcomes, especially when small audit sample sizes for large margins reduce voter trust, and found through a user study with 105 U.S. participants that participants felt less confident when informed about the number of ballots audited.
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.