Perhaps one of the most difficult questions to answer about how to make election systems secure and reliable is the question about how to make sure an audit of an election system is statistically sound.

Let's start with a simple hypothetical example of the town of Smallville--

Founded in 1805, Smallville is, not surprisingly, a small town that happens to have 100 eligible voters, all of whom vote each year on paper ballots in a single polling location with a single secure ballot box. Elizabeth Small, descendant of the town's founder Elijah Small, was recently re-elected to her fourth term as City Clerk and oversees counting of the paper ballots by representatives of both "major" political parties in Smallville. In Smallville's two hundred year history, there was only one known miscount of the paper ballots.

In a famous case where there was a difference of only one vote in the vote count, mayoral candidate Penny Lane demanded a recount, speculating that if a total of 100 eligible voters voted, there should be a difference of at least two votes if there was any difference at all in the count, unless a voter failed to vote for mayor. In fact, she was correct and Penny Lane ousted incumbent mayor Don Street in a run-off election conducted after the recount of the initial election showed a tie vote, 50-50, for mayor.

The Lane-Street election battle generated a lot of animosity in Smallville with representatives of both parties charging the other side of tampering with the vote count to gain advantage. So, the Smallville City Council decided it had to respond to the controversy by passing an audit and recount law that would ensure public confidence in results of the election and dissuade unscrupulous people from attempting election tampering or fraud. Since ballot secrecy was well-respected in Smallville and since everyone deposited their ballots into the same ballot box, the only way to conduct an audit or recount was to check all the ballots in the ballot box. Fortunately, it doesn't take that long for the Smallvilleans to verify a maximum of 100 ballots in their second count of the ballots each year under the new election audit law.

All was now swell in Smallville, but things were not nearly as bright in nearby Bigtown--

{more coming soon}

We have assembled additional resources below that address the issue of stastical significance in auditing of election systems.