  Georgia was central to efforts to overturn the 2020 Presidential election,
including a call from then-president Trump to Georgia Secretary of State
Raffensperger asking Raffensperger to `find' 11,780 votes. Raffensperger has
maintained that a `100% full-count risk-limiting audit' and a machine recount
agreed with the initial machine-count results, which proved that the reported
election results were accurate and that `no votes were flipped.' There is no
indication of widespread fraud, but there is reason to distrust the election
outcome: the two machine counts and the manual `audit' tallies disagree
substantially, even about the number of ballots cast. Some ballots in Fulton
County were included in the original count at least twice; some were included
in the machine recount at least thrice. Audit results for some tally batches
were omitted from the reported audit totals. The two machine counts and the
audit were not probative of who won because of poor processes and controls: a
lack of secure physical chain of custody, ballot accounting, pollbook
reconciliation, and accounting for other election materials such as memory
cards. Moreover, most voters voted with demonstrably untrustworthy
ballot-marking devices, so even a perfect handcount or audit would not
necessarily reveal who really won. True risk-limiting audits (RLAs) and
rigorous recounts can limit the risk that an incorrect electoral outcome will
be certified rather than being corrected. But no procedure can limit that risk
without a trustworthy record of the vote. And even a properly conducted RLA of
some contests in an election does not show that any other contests in that
election were decided correctly. The 2020 U.S. Presidential election in Georgia
illustrates unrecoverable errors that can render recounts and audits `security
theater' that distract from the more serious problems rather than justifying
trust.
