Nobody is required to check the count
After machines count the votes, someone should check a batch of the real paper ballots by hand to confirm the machine got it right. If the law doesn't require that check, a wrong count can slip through unnoticed.
Explainer video coming soon
A 60-second, plain-language walkthrough of this gap.
What actually happened
Election-integrity researchers Mark Lindeman and Philip Stark formalized the “risk-limiting audit” (RLA): a method that hand-checks just enough randomly-chosen paper ballots to give strong statistical confidence the reported winner is correct. Where audits are optional, weak (a fixed tiny percentage), or skipped, that confidence simply doesn't exist.
Marking your own homework
Imagine a student who grades their own test and reports the score. Maybe they're honest. Maybe they made a mistake. The only way to know is for someone else to re-check some of the answers.
A voting machine reports its own score too. An audit is the independent re-check: take a batch of the actual paper ballots, count them by hand, and compare to what the machine said. The smart version — a risk-limiting audit — checks just enough random ballots to be highly confident the right candidate won, then stops.
Why it matters
Counting paper by hand is the proof. But a paper trail only helps if someone is required to use it. When audits are optional, "on request" only, or set at a token fixed percentage, a wrong result — from a glitch or from tampering — can be certified without anyone ever opening the ballot boxes.
A required, well-designed audit turns "trust the machine" into "verify the machine."
How TrustVoting closes it
Every vote leaves a voter-verified paper record, and the system is designed for risk-limiting audits — so the paper can always be checked against the machine count to a defined level of confidence.
How TrustVoting closes it
TrustVoting produces a voter-verified paper record for every ballot and is built to support risk-limiting audits, so the machine count can always be checked against real paper to a defined confidence level.