Colorado Secretary of State’s Office Begins Bipartisan Post-Election Risk-Limiting Audit of Colorado’s 2023 Coordinated Election

Denver, November 17, 2023 - The Secretary of State’s Office convened a public meeting today to establish the random seed for the 2023 Coordinated Election Bipartisan Risk-Limiting Audit (RLA). RLAs are one of many tools Colorado uses that verify the results of our elections. Colorado voters can be confident their ballots were counted correctly.

“The bipartisan Risk Limiting Audit will verify that Colorado’s 2023 Coordinated Election was accurate and secure,” said Secretary Griswold. “Colorado is the best place to be a voter. The Risk Limiting Audit is an important tool in ensuring transparency and verifying our elections.”

After every statewide election, the Colorado Secretary of State’s Office works with every Colorado county that uses ballot counting equipment to conduct a bipartisan Risk Limiting Audit. The Risk Limiting Audit is conducted by bipartisan election judges from every county conduct to make sure ballots were tabulated correctly according to the intent of the voters who cast them.

At this morning’s meeting, 20 individual 10-sided die were rolled, establishing each digit of a 20-digit random seed. The division’s voting systems team will enter the random seed into a pseudo-random number generator incorporated in the Secretary of State’s open-source RLA software. This process will result in a selection of individual ballots for each county to examine and audit – which is both truly random and replicable – ensuring the statistical validity of the audit.

The random seed established at today’s RLA public meeting has been published on the Audit Center of the Secretary of State’s website and is as follows:

Roll	#1	#2	#3	#4	#5	#6	#7	#8	#9	#10	#11	#12	#13	#14	#15	#16	#17	#18	#19	#20
Seed	0	9	1	7	5	0	5	9	3	4	2	9	8	1	5	8	6	5	0	5

On November 9, 2023, the Secretary of State’s office selected the statewide and countywide target contests for the 2023 Coordinated Election RLA. The complete list of target contests, which includes every statewide race, is available on the Audit Center.

The state is using Colorado RLA Software Version 2.4.23. The open-source code for the software can be found on GitHub.