DEF CON 29 Voting Village - Carsten Schürmann - How to Weaponize RLAs to Discredit an Election

Risk-limiting audits (RLAs) are widely considered to be the gold standard of election auditing, and there is an implicit assumption that a successful audit will also create confidence among the voters and hence public trust. If this were true, there would be little reason to fear that RLAs could ever be misused in a disinformation campaign. It turns out, however, that this assumption is not necessarily true: In a recent user study to appear this year's E-Vote-ID, we show that a significant number of survey participants change their opinion whether to trust an election after they learn the size of the sample needed to complete the RLA. In this talk we argue that even a well-intended correctly conducted RLA can be weaponized in a disinformation campaign.