California Elections Code on auditing

From Section 15360:

(a) During the official canvass of every election in which a
voting system is used, the official conducting the election shall
conduct a public manual tally of the ballots tabulated by those
devices, including vote by mail voters’ ballots, cast in 1 percent of
the precincts chosen at random by the elections official. If 1
percent of the precincts is less than one whole precinct, the tally
shall be conducted in one precinct chosen at random by the elections
official.

In addition to the 1 percent manual tally, the elections official
shall, for each race not included in the initial group of precincts,
count one additional precinct. The manual tally shall apply only to
the race not previously counted.

Additional precincts for the manual tally may be selected at the
discretion of the elections official.

Clearly this is not written by a statistician. Counting 1% of precincts “chosen at random” is hardly clear, and also doesn’t tell you too much about how many ballots you are going to count.

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