Colorado Begins Post-Election Audit of 2024 Presidential Primary Election

Denver, March 18, 2024 - The Secretary of State’s Office convened a public meeting to set parameters for the 2024 presidential primary bipartisan post-election audit. This process ensures that each voter’s ballot was counted the way they intended, in every county.

 “Our post-election audit enables counties and the State to verify that the results of the election are accurate,” said Secretary Griswold. “Colorado is the best place to be a voter, and the Risk Limiting Audit is an important tool in verifying our elections.”

After every statewide election, the Colorado Secretary of State’s Office works with every Colorado county that uses ballot counting equipment to conduct a bipartisan Risk Limiting Audit. The Risk Limiting Audit is a test that bipartisan election judges from every county conduct to make sure ballots were tabulated correctly according to the intent of the voters who cast them.

At today’s meeting, 20 individual 10-sided die were rolled, establishing each digit of a 20-digit random seed. The division’s voting systems team will enter the random seed into a pseudo-random number generator incorporated in the Secretary of State’s open-source RLA software. This process will result in a selection of individual ballots for each county to examine and audit, which is both truly random and replicable, thus ensuring the statistical validity of the audit.

The random seed established at today’s RLA public meeting has been published on the Audit Center of the Secretary of State’s website and is as follows:

Roll	#1	#2	#3	#4	#5	#6	#7	#8	#9	#10	#11	#12	#13	#14	#15	#16	#17	#18	#19	#20
Seed	4	9	8	7	9	6	9	7	0	5	9	7	3	5	6	3	5	2	5	8

On March 8, the Secretary of State’s office selected the statewide and countywide target contests for the 2024 Presidential Primary Election RLA. The complete list of target contests, which includes every statewide race, is available on the Audit Center. The state is using Colorado RLA Software Version 3.0.1. The open-source code for the software can be found here.

The Risk-Limiting Audit has been conducted in every Colorado election since the 2017 Coordinated Election. The audit has never found a discrepancy that was a result of the voting system not working as intended.