This tool promotes election integrity by providing evidence-based transparency, potentially curbing misinformation related to election fraud.
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TUCSON, AZ — The nonprofit organization AUDIT USA has unveiled a free election verification tool called “ABE,” designed to enhance transparency and trust in election results.
AUDIT USA describes ABE as user-friendly and accessible to anyone interested in validating election results, including media, election officials, candidates, and the general public. The tool allows users to independently verify election outcomes using digital ballot images and the Cast Vote Record (CVR) database. It operates on a Microsoft 365 platform using Excel spreadsheet software.
Ballot images are digital scans (pictures) of paper ballots, created by voting machines as part of the tabulation process. Digital voting systems, which are in use in approximately 95 percent of election jurisdictions in the US, count the votes from the digital images, not from the original paper ballots. These images preserve the original markings of voters, providing a digital record that can be reviewed independently.
The Cast Vote Record is a separate digital file that summarizes how each ballot was interpreted by the voting system, detailing individual votes for each contest. Together, ballot images and CVRs offer a comprehensive way to verify election results, as they allow for a comparison between what voters marked on their ballots and what the machines recorded. This dual-layer verification is central to the ABE tool’s auditing process, ensuring transparency and accuracy.
ABE’s primary function is to verify election results by cross-referencing ballot images with the CVR, which shows how voting systems recorded individual votes. ABE provides a hyperlink for each ballot image that links it to its corresponding row in the CVR database.
Users can audit results by precinct and review within-precinct disparities, such as overvotes or undervotes, through ABE’s organized data structure. Precinct-level data is important to provide both historical and demographic context in elections. By analyzing results at the most granular level, precinct data allows election officials, researchers, the media, and voters to understand and track voting patterns in specific communities.
Analysis of such data helps reveal anomalies in election outcomes and also helps to discern trends in voter behavior, such as shifts in party allegiance, turnout rates among various demographic groups, and responses to local issues and candidates.
ABE also allows users to audit results by individual election contest, including overvotes and undervotes. It provides the total number of ballot images for each election contest and provides notice of any missing ballot images, allowing for a quick check against official election results. Thus ABE can verify or detect errors in counts of both entire ballots and individual votes, each being an essential component of electoral integrity.
The Vital Importance of Transparency
AUDIT USA highlights that this tool promotes election integrity by providing evidence-based transparency, potentially curbing misinformation related to election fraud, including both baseless allegations and facile, “just trust us” assurances.
AUDIT USA encourages election officials, candidates, researchers, the media, and voters to use ABE to conduct random digital precinct audits as a check and verification of election results.
Named for Abraham Lincoln, a lifelong advocate for the public’s right to know, and also an acronym for “A Better Election,” ABE currently works with Election Systems & Software (ES&S) voting systems and aims to support other voting systems in the future.
AUDIT USA’s co-founder, John Brakey, emphasized the need for transparency in election results, stating that public access to digital records is crucial for increasing trust in election outcomes.
“Sadly, in recent elections, we have seen that too many people trust election results only if their candidate wins,” Brakey said. “We believe that everyone, no matter whom they voted for, should have the ability to verify for themselves that the results are accurate.”
According to AUDIT USA, ABE ensures security through digital redundancy, making tampering nearly impossible.
The organization encourages election officials, candidates, researchers, the media, and voters to use ABE to conduct random digital precinct audits as a check and verification of election results.
How To Use the Tool
In order to check specific election outcomes, users would need to obtain ballot images and the CVR database from their local elections office. While that would ordinarily require a public records request, AUDIT USA encourages election officials to post ballot images and CVRs online for easy public access, which will save them the time and effort otherwise required to fulfill individual requests.
The US Election Assistance Commission (EAC), on its website, provides a description of the election audits conducted in each state and explains the importance of those audits:
Election audits ensure voting systems operate accurately, that election officials comply with regulations or internal policies, and that discrepancies are identified and resolved in an effort to promote voter confidence in the election administration process. There is no national auditing standard, and methods can vary from procedural, traditional, risk-limiting, tiered, or a combination of these types.
While a uniform national auditing standard has been proposed at various times, traditional state- and county-level control of election processes has made such a national mandate controversial. For now, with auditing a patchwork, the idea behind ABE is to augment the transparency and trust levels achieved by existing audits, and provide a tool to expand their reach.
AUDIT USA, a nonpartisan 501(c)3 organization, has been advocating for improved election verification since 2005, focusing on using ballot-image audits to verify results. The group believes that tools like ABE are essential for the future of election transparency.
For more details and to access the ABE tool, visit AUDIT USA on Facebook or watch the ABE demonstration video on YouTube.
