News Release

Colorado Begins Post-Election Audit of 2024 General Election

Denver, November 18, 2024 - Today the Department of State convened a public meeting to set parameters for the 2024 General Election bipartisan post-election audit. The bipartisan Risk Limiting Audit ensures that ballots were counted correctly.

After every statewide election, the Department of State 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 public meeting, 20 individual 10-sided dice 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 Department 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:

On November 8, the Department of State selected the statewide and countywide target contests for the 2024 General 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.