Proposed Virginia Budget Would Eliminate Audit of 2024 Presidential Election Results

The biennial budget proposed by Virginia lawmakers contains a provision that would forbid the commonwealth from conducting an audit of the 2024 presidential results in November.

While Virginia law mandates a “risk-limiting audit” be administered after every presidential election, an amendment proposed by the General Assembly seeks to declare, “a risk-limiting audit of a presidential election or an election for the nomination of candidates for the office of President shall not be conducted.”

An explanation provided by lawmakers in the budget explains, “a risk-limiting audit relating to a presidential election shall not be conducted.”

The risk-limiting audit is conducted after preliminary results of a presidential election are announced but before the election is certified by Virginia officials.

The Virginia government explains a risk-limiting audit “requires a hand count of randomly sampled printed ballots that continues until there is either strong statistical evidence that the reported outcome is correct or, in the absence of such evidence, a full hand count of all ballots cast in the contested race that determines the outcome.”

A risk-limiting audit conducted after the 2020 election confirmed President Joe Biden’s margin of victory, determining there was less than a 0.00004 percent chance the results were inaccurate.

While the proposed budget amendment would do away with the audit for the presidential contest, the language would reportedly see officials audit the U.S. Senate race between Senator Tim Kaine (R-VA) and his eventual Republican challenger and a yet-undetermined U.S. House race.

The move by Virginia lawmakers to do cut the audit of the presidential election comes after an election expert called for more states to hold automatic election audits.

Chad Ennis of the Honest Elections Project in January noted, “It is much easier to fix process problems early before they blow up and become problems that require litigation and other nasty fixes.”

“Ahead of the 2024 election, state legislatures should require full process audits to ensure transparency and build trust in our elections,” Ennis said.

The former director of the Forensic Audit Division of the Texas Secretary of State, Ennis, noted an audit of Harris County “could not show proper chain of custody for almost 185,000 ballots.”

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Tom Pappert is the lead reporter for The Tennessee Star, and also reports for The Georgia Star News, The Virginia Star, and The Arizona Sun Times. Follow Tom on X/Twitter. Email tips to [email protected].
Photo “People Voting” by Phil Roeder. CC BY 2.0.