Risk Limiting Audits play a key role in the election fraud mosaic in that they appear to have been designed to mislead the public by providing inappropriate assurances that there have been meaningful audits of election results.

Risk Limiting Audits have serious deficiencies:

• The RLA regime was developed by Democrat organizations and originally pushed in a handful of Democrat-controlled states. Should be a red flag.

• The inventor of the RLA regime ultimately disavowed the RLA regime as “magic dust” as it is incapable of identifying the most important election risks, which are illegal ballots injected into the system and lack of chain-of-custody.

• ELECT publishes the results of such “audits” implicitly as having the efficacy of full-blown forensic audits, effectively perpetrating a fraud on the people of Virginia who believe that all important aspects of their elections have been scrutinized.

• The choice of methods allowed under the Democrat-defined RLA regime is not really relevant. All forms of RLAs suffer from the basic deficiencies, None should be used.

• ELECT does not understand the statistics or selection criteria for either. And who knows under the hood how precincts and such are being selected. It is documented that in Arizona the bad guys set aside pristine boxes of ballots to be opened if limited audits were mandated.

• Why is a 90% “confidence level” used when most statistical tests involving critical determinations will strive for a 99% or 99.5% level. Who made that decision.

• The entire test regime is opaque. ELECT performs a kabuki random seed generation exercise which is purportedly entered into the Voter Works platform (by Voter Works personnel) and ELECT then receives instructions as to what selection are to be made. A review of this process revealed that there are absolutely NO internal controls over the maintenance of the code (or even what code is used) or process that one would normally expect to find in a system deemed to be critical infrastructure.

• ELECT cannot reproduce any statistical calculations or verify the selection process in any way. THE SYSTEM IS NONTRANSPARENT AND UNAUDITABLE.

The impression that there are marginal difference in the relative levels of assurances with respect to the alternative RLA methodologies is illusory. Discussions as to which method is superior serve to distract from the more important matter that RLAs as constituted need to be junked entirely.

What might be more useful is to make an effort to redefine what such an audit should look like. Don’t allow the definition and procedures be determined by the Democrats. They have an agenda.

Verified Voting is promoting the “shiny” part of auditing–the RLA procedure–at the expense of a far more fundamental requirement for trustworthy elections: a trustworthy paper trail. Whitewashing inherently untrustworthy elections by overclaiming what applying RLA procedures to an untrustworthy paper trail can accomplish sets back election integrity. This is security theater, not election integrity.

-RLA Inventor Phillip Stark