Virginia Democrats have inserted an amendment to the Virginia budget that would forbid even the most basic audit of the 2024 election.
The budget amendment reads, “[A] risk-limiting audit of a presidential election or an election for the nomination of candidates for the office of president shall not be conducted.”
The risk-limiting audit (RLA) is a process designed to confirm that the machine count of ballot results matches the physical ballots that have been preserved. The RLA process begins with a relatively small number of randomly selected ballots and expands its scope until statistical near-certainty that the machines have accurately reported the paper ballot results has been reached.
After the 2020 election, the Virginia State Board of Elections expanded the methods available for RLAs to include a type called the batch-comparison method. The batch comparison RLA selects a few precincts in each locality to be hand-counted. The audit results check whether the voting machine count matches the paper ballots that passed through them. This method has been used successfully in Virginia since the 2020 election and is an important component of an overall audit process to reassure the public that their elections are truly free and fair.
Partisan efforts to thwart election integrity in Virginia have recently intensified after citizen activism has moved Virginia toward greater election transparency and accountability. For example, Virginia statute 24.2-671.2 currently requires statewide risk-limiting audits. Today, Virginia is one of only several U.S. states that require risk-limiting audits by statute.
Risk-limiting audits only ask whether machine
