Colorado Risk-Limiting Audit (RLA) Software

The Colorado RLA Software is designed to help local and state election officials conduct efficient and effective risk-limiting audits of their elections. The initial code was developed by the Colorado Department of State through a contract with Free & Fair in 2017, and is now being developed and maintained by Democracy Works, a 501(c)3 nonpartisan, nonprofit organization.

What is a risk-limiting audit?

A risk-limiting audit is an audit of the results of an election which uses statistical methods to give high confidence that the winner(s) of the election were reported correctly.

In Colorado, citizen audit boards examine a random sample of original paper ballots from an election, comparing the votes marked on each original paper ballot with the electronic representation of votes recorded by the vote tabulation system. Under most circumstances, this method requires auditing far fewer ballots than a full hand recount or fixed-percentage audit, while also providing strong statistical evidence that the outcome of the election was correct.

Description

The RLA Software is designed to facilitate a statistically valid audit of vote tabulation processes by comparing the votes marked on a random sample of original paper ballots with the electronically recorded votes for those same ballots.

The RLA Software:

1. Calculates how many original paper ballots need to be audited for the targeted contest(s).
2. Randomly selects which original paper ballots will be audited and creates lists to help local election officials find the necessary ballots in storage.
3. Provides an interface for audit board teams to record the votes they see marked on the original paper ballot(s).
4. Checks whether the audited votes and recorded votes for each ballot match, and determines at the end of the audit round whether the desired confidence interval has been achieved based on these results (if not, additional ballots are randomly selected and audited).
5. Provides metrics and monitoring capabilities for election officials and public observers that indicate the progress and outcome of the audit.

Development (Docker)

We publish Docker containers for the three major components of the system, built automatically from the master branch.

You can use these containers to get started working on a single piece of the system.

Requirements

• docker
• docker-compose

Setup

Build the latest development images:

docker-compose build

You do not need to do this every time, just when you need to update a component. Otherwise, docker-compose up will use the existing Docker images that are on your system, which may not be what you want (e.g. if you want to test some changes you made, you need to rebuild the dependent image).

Running

Assuming you now have up-to-date images, you can bring up the system with those images:

docker-compose up

The application frontend will then be accessible at localhost:8080.

Once the system is running, the server will create the PostgreSQL schema. After this, test credentials will be installed by the test-credentials service.

With the test credentials loaded, you should be able to log in as a state administrator using stateadmin1 as the username with any password, and as a county administrator with countyadmin1 as the username along with any password. There are other usernames, especially for the counties (countyadmin1 maps to a specific county). You may be able to use this file as a hint for the others: server/eclipse-project/src/main/resources/us/freeandfair/corla/county_ids.properties

Modifying the workflow

As an example, an easy way to get started if you just want to work on the client would be to run the following:

## OPTIONAL: Build updated images first
# docker-compose build postgresql server
docker-compose up postgresql server test-credentials

This will start the database, the API server, and automatically seed test credentials when the server comes up. Then, all you need to do is enter client/ and follow the usual npm install; npm start workflow to fire up a development server, and you're off!

Development (non-Docker)

There are three main components of the system that are required for development:

1. TypeScript web client
2. Java API server
3. PostgreSQL database

Once you have read through the overviews of each, you will want to do the following:

1. Start a PostgreSQL database. You can start one from a Docker image, or you can use a database on your machine or a development server. If the database is not available at localhost:5432, you may need to adjust the server configuration later.
2. Start the API server. The server will connect to the PostgreSQL database and automatically create the schema for you. If your API server is not available at localhost:8888, you may need to adjust the client configuration later.
3. Seed the database with test credentials. These are available in test/sql/corla-test-credentials.psql. It is required that the server starts and populates the schema first.
4. Start the client.

Releases

script/build-release is a script that can be run unattended and will build a release ZIP file in server/eclipse-project/target/colorado-rla-release-VERSION.zip containing production-ready builds of the code in this repository.

Documentation

More documentation can be found under docs.

Contributors

• Democracy Works
• Free & Fair
• Colorado Department of State
• Colorado County Clerks Association
• Special thanks also to Philip Stark, Ron Rivest, Mark Lindeman, and others in the State Audit Working Group and RLA Representative Group for their work to develop and refine risk-limiting audits