Evidence-Based Elections

The authors propose an alternative to current requirements for certifying voting equipment and conducting elections. They argue that elections should be structured to provide convincing affirmative evidence that the reported outcomes actually reflect how people voted. This can be accomplished with a combination of software-independent voting systems, compliance audits, and risk-limiting audits. Together, these yield a resilient canvass framework: a fault-tolerant approach to conducting elections that gives strong evidence that the reported outcome is correct or reports that the evidence is not convincing. If evidence-based elections are adopted, certification and testing of voting equipment can be relaxed, saving money and time and reducing barriers to innovation in voting systems-and election integrity will benefit. The authors conclude that there should be more regulation of the evidence trail and less regulation of equipment, and that compliance audits and risk-limiting audits should be required.