Risk-limiting audits (RLAs) are expected to strengthen the public confidence in the correctness of an election outcome. We hypothesize that this is not always the case, in part because for large margins between the winner and the runner-up, the number of ballots to be drawn can be so small that voters lose confidence. We conduct a user study with 105 participants resident in the US. Our findings confirm the hypothesis, showing that our study participants felt less confident when they were told the number of ballots audited for RLAs. We elaborate on our findings and propose recommendations for future use of RLAs.
翻译:风险限制审计(RLAs)有望加强公众对选举结果正确性的信心,我们假设情况并非总是如此,部分原因是对获胜者与当选者之间的大差额而言,所选选票的数量可能太小,以致选民失去信心。我们与居住在美国的105名参与者进行了用户研究。我们的调查结果证实了这一假设,表明我们的研究参与者在被告知为当选者审计的选票数量时不太有信心。我们详细阐述了我们的调查结果,并就未来使用RLAs提出了建议。