Georgia's 2024 Statewide Risk Limiting Audit Confirms Voting System Accuracy
Beginning last Thursday, election officials in all of Georgia’s 159 counties hand counted randomly selected ballots as part of the statewide audit of the 2024 Presidential Election. A risk limit of 5% was set for the risk limiting audit (RLA), a limit that is among the best in the country for jurisdictions that conduct RLAs.
The Secretary of State’s office is pleased to announce that the audit confirmed the outcome of the contest.
In total, county election officials audited 442 batches of ballots. Of the 442 batches, 381 (86.1%) had no deviation from the original candidate vote totals. Out of the other 61, all fell within an expected margin of error for a hand count.
Below is a comparison of the vote totals for each candidate for the batches that were audited:
This small amount of difference is well within the expected margin of error for an audit of this size, and largely caused by human error during the hand counting process.
Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger commented upon hearing the results of the audit. “Georgia’s election systems are our nation’s best,” he said. “This is exactly why I’m leading the push to see our reforms instituted on a national level. This audit shows that our system works and that our county election officials conducted a secure, accurate election - they are the cream of the crop.”
Georgia’s audit was supported by Voting Works and their Arlo auditing software.
The requirement for a post-election, pre-certification audit was introduced in Georgia during the 2019 legislative session following the introduction of a voter-verified paper-ballot voting system. The purpose of the audit is to ensure the correct outcome of election contests. The successful completion of this year’s RLA audit is one more indicator that Georgia is the #1 state for Election Integrity.
CLICK HERE for a report with audit summary data.
CLICK HERE for a zip file with all of the ballot manifests and machine batch tallies.
This includes all batches statewide, including those that were audited. You can confirm that these were the same batch tallies that we started the audit with by performing a SHA256 hash of the file and matching it to the tweet from Gabriel Sterling (@GabrielSterling) from 11/15/2024 at 11:30AM.
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Georgia is recognized as a national leader in elections. It was the first state in the country to implement the trifecta of automatic voter registration, at least 17 days of early voting (which has been called the “gold standard”), and no-excuse absentee voting. Georgia continues to set records for voter turnout and election participation, seeing the largest increase in average turnout of any other state in the 2018 midterm election and record turnout in 2020, and 2022. 2022 achieved the largest single day of in-person early voting turnout in Georgia midterm history utilizing Georgia’s secure, paper ballot voting system. Most recently, Georgia ranked #2 for Election Integrity by the Heritage Foundation, a top ranking for Voter Accessibility by the Center for Election Innovation & Research and tied for number one in Election Administration by the Bipartisan Policy Center.