Weight, Weight, Don't Tell Me: Using Scales to Select Ballots for Auditing

Ballot-based auditing offers a much higher level of statistical confidence for any given number of ballots counted than does precinct-based auditing. Unfortunately, it also comes with the problem of efficiently finding any particular ballot so that it can be audited. Previous work on ballot-based auditing has required modifying the ballots to add a serial number which could be used for indexing. We describe a method for using scales and ballot weight to quickly index into a stack of ballots. Preliminary experiments suggest that this method may be a practical alternative that is compatible with existing hardware.