Baltz Samuel, Gonzalez Fernanda, Guo Kevin, Jaffe Jacob, Stewart Charles
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA 02139.
Wellesley College, Wellesley, MA 02481.
Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2025 May 20;122(20):e2419633122. doi: 10.1073/pnas.2419633122. Epub 2025 May 13.
After many elections, the accuracy of the vote count is assessed by retabulating a small percentage of ballots. These audits form one of the richest bodies of evidence regarding electoral legitimacy, which is particularly important in democracies where the accuracy of elections has been prominently questioned. In decentralized democracies such as the United States, however, there is tremendous variation in the conduct and reporting of audits, which are never compiled into one place to facilitate precise analysis of their results. Here, we introduce a nation-scale audit result dataset, which we use to estimate the error rate in vote counting during the 2020 U.S. election. The dataset includes all available postelection tabulation audits, spanning 856 regional governments across 27 states, with 71,702,471 individual votes and a further 1,210,528 ballots, including about 6.2% of all votes cast for Donald Trump and 6.9% of those cast for Joe Biden. We find that election audits shifted the net presidential vote count by only about 0.007%, with similarly minuscule errors across all major types of electoral contests. The construction of a nation-scale election audit dataset represents a novel approach to benchmarking electoral legitimacy and provides particularly direct and comprehensive evidence that Americans' votes were counted correctly in 2020.
在多次选举后，通过重新统计一小部分选票来评估计票的准确性。这些审计构成了有关选举合法性的最丰富的证据来源之一，这在选举准确性受到显著质疑的民主国家尤为重要。然而，在像美国这样的分权民主国家，审计的实施和报告存在巨大差异，而且从未汇总到一处以便对其结果进行精确分析。在此，我们引入了一个全国范围的审计结果数据集，并用它来估计2020年美国大选计票中的错误率。该数据集包括所有可得的选举后重新计票审计，涵盖27个州的856个地区政府，涉及71,702,471张个人选票以及另外1,210,528张选票，其中包括唐纳德·特朗普所获全部选票的约6.2%以及乔·拜登所获选票的6.9%。我们发现，选举审计使总统净计票数仅变动了约0.007%，在所有主要类型的选举竞争中错误同样极小。构建全国范围的选举审计数据集代表了一种衡量选举合法性的新方法，并提供了特别直接和全面的证据，证明2020年美国民众的选票被正确计票。
