Thread by @mattblaze

There’s going to be all sorts of analysis of the AZ “audit” report that’s being officially released tomorrow, which is more attention than it deserves. But at least this exercise in low-rent clownery reached the same conclusion about the outcome as the adult audits did.

https://twitter.com/maricopacounty/status/1441228176600952839

Again - and this is the critical take-away here that I fear will be lost in the noise - the “Cyber Ninja Audit” has nothing in common with the rigorous Risk Limiting Audits recommended by experts (and which should be done after every election routinely).

Meaningful election audits are a well-defined process that provides quantifiable assurance that the reported outcomes match the ballots cast. The AZ fiasco, on the other hand, was an open-ended attempt to cast doubt on a valid outcome. And it failed even at that.

The report will, no doubt, reveal trivial and non-substantive discrepancies in records and processes. But ANY election, a huge logistical operation carried out by tens of thousands of (largely temporary) workers under enormous time pressure, has small errors. That’s not unusual.

The relevant questions - the only questions - are whether there was actual fraud and whether any errors affected the outcome. Not whether humans in an inherently imperfect process ever acted imperfectly.

US election security doesn’t fit a clean narrative. There *are* vulnerabilities in much of our election infrastructure, and safeguards like paper ballots and RLAs need to be universal. At the same time, there’s no evidence technical attacks have ever altered an election outcome.

This is why exaggerations here, whether in good faith or bad, are so toxic. The answer to claims that “there are vulnerabilities, therefore this election was stolen” is not to dig in on an equally false claim that “there are no vulnerabilities”.

The truth is that there’s been *enormous* progress making US elections more secure in recent years. Inherently vulnerable DRE machines are rapidly becoming obsolete, which is great. But there’s still work to do.