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Tools for Excellence: Showing Your Work with Tabulation Audits
A collection of nonpartisan resources focusing on accurate and transparent tabulation audits (originally featured in Counted Fall 2026)
Intended User
Election Phase
Office Size
Authoring Organization
Introduction
One of those important post-election responsibilities is conducting a tabulation audit. While every state has its own rules and requirements for certain elements of these audits, they all share two main goals: ensuring that the results reported are correct, and assuring the public that the results are correct. Just like in math class, it’s not enough to get the right answer: you need to show your work. The nonpartisan resources from the U.S. Alliance for Election Excellence can help with designing and implementing your tabulation audits to achieve these goals.Â
Managing ballots with audits in mind
As with most processes in elections, tabulation audits require a lot of preparation to be successful. Long before auditors are sitting down with a stack of ballots to review, the way election officials manage ballots plays a big role in how smoothly the audit goes. Following ballot management best practices can make your audit setup more efficient and serve as the foundation for the audit’s validity. If you pull the wrong ballots, you won’t be properly checking the machine count; if the ballots’ chain of custody is questionable, you’ll introduce doubt into the public’s perception of the results.
Designing the audit
Although audits can be conducted in many ways — from fixed percentage samples to risk-limiting audits — there are a few best practices that all tabulation audits should strive for:
- Selection of batches should be random.
- Auditors should be independent from the tabulation process. That means auditors shouldn’t know the machine count before doing their own review, and people who worked on the initial tabulation shouldn’t serve as auditors.
- Audits should be done in teams with at least two people (preferably of different party affiliations) examining each ballot.
Election offices are full of dedicated, ethical public servants who work toward the right result. By following these best practices, offices can help assure the public that:
- Their office didn’t choose a convenient sample — the sample was random.
- Their office didn’t bias the auditors by telling them the “right” result ahead of time — they had to come to an independent count.
- An auditor didn’t make up their results, because the auditors worked in teams.
Reporting audit results
Most offices do very careful and precise work on their audits. But far fewer offices produce plain language audit reports that can be read and understood by the average voter. Most reports are designed for a supervising commission, council, or state elections office and then published in that same format for the public. Showing your work requires more than just taking the right steps and adopting procedures to reduce bias: election offices need to explain what they did, the results, and what those results mean.
For tabulation audits to serve their role as a tool for bolstering trust in the election process and results, it is necessary to publish them in a way that non-experts can understand.
Conclusion
Like Election Day, a successful tabulation audit is the result of preparation and follow-up. By building a solid foundation, designing procedures that build trust, and sharing an accessible report, election offices can help ensure that voters’ ballots were properly counted and that they can have confidence in the outcome.
To read more articles from Counted Fall 2026, visit https://www.CountedMagazine.org/
