HARRISBURG, PA \u2014 Pennsylvania election officials on Friday began a statewide post-election audit of the May 19 primary, a review designed to verify the accuracy of the reported outcome in the Republican lieutenant governor race, the only contested statewide contest on the ballot.<\/p>\n
The Department of State launched the risk-limiting audit, or RLA, by generating a random 20-digit number that will determine which ballot batches counties must manually review over the coming days. Ten department employees participated in the selection process by rolling 10-sided dice.<\/p>\n
The audit is Pennsylvania\u2019s eighth statewide risk-limiting audit and serves as an independent verification of election results through statistical sampling rather than a full recount.<\/p>\n
County election officials will hand-count votes from randomly selected ballot batches and compare those totals with the original machine-tabulated results. The process is intended to determine whether the reported outcome would match the results of a full manual count.<\/p>\n
Secretary of the Commonwealth Al Schmidt said risk-limiting audits provide a scientific method for validating election outcomes.<\/p>\n
\u201cRLAs remain the highest standard of comprehensive election audits because the process provides a statistically sound, scientific method for confirming that the reported outcome of the election is accurate,\u201d Schmidt said.<\/p>\n
The review is separate from Pennsylvania\u2019s legally required post-election audit, which requires counties to conduct a statistical recount of at least 2% of ballots cast, or 2,000 ballots, whichever number is smaller, after every primary and general election.<\/p>\n
Under the state\u2019s audit schedule, counties must complete the risk-limiting audit by Wednesday and certify their election results to the Department of State by June 8.<\/p>\n
The Department of State livestreamed the random selection process, which officials said was intended to provide public transparency into election administration and post-election verification procedures.<\/p>\n
Additional information about Pennsylvania\u2019s risk-limiting audit process is available at vote.pa.gov\/audits.<\/p>\n