NOTe: This is a risk-limiting audit. It’s NOT a recount being done to appease Trump. It was always planned that Georgia would do a risk-limiting audit of one statewide race this election. It makes sense that the chosen race is the presidential one. https://twitter.com/AmyEGardner/status/1326547451688308748

Journalists, if you’re going to write about this, please understand the difference between a recount and an audit. A risk-limiting audit does not recount all the ballots. Officials manually examine only a PERCENTAGE of randomly chosen paper ballots in such an audit.

In this particular case, GA will manually audit ALL of the ballots in the presidential race because of the type of risk-limiting audit they’ve chosen to do and because they chose the presidential race to audit. In risk-limiting audits, the percentage of ballots examined...

is based on margin of victory in race. The smaller the margin, the more ballots you audit. Because margin in presidential race in Georgia is so narrow, state would have to randomly select more than a million ballots to audit. It’s cheaper/more efficient to just audit all of them.

Another reason why what they're doing in GA is an audit and not a recount - because Georgia's election law says that a recount is done by having a scanner read a QR code printed on each ballot. It does not involve a manual count unless the scanners are shown to be untrustworthy.

It's hard to convey this in brief tweets, but what I'm trying to say is that GA was set to announce this morning which race it would use in its risk-limiting audit. The initial plan, as I understand it, was to do a down-ballot race and not the presidential race. That changed.

It made sense for them to choose the presidential race instead of a down-ballot race, since that is the most controversial one. But because the margin in the presidential race is so narrow, they would have had to pull more than a million random ballots for the audit.

In an RLA, a computer randomly picks which ballots to audit. One ballot from a batch at this precinct, two ballots from a batch at that precinct. It's extremely time-consuming because workers in every county have to locate these ballots and prepare them to be examined.

It requires strong chain-of-custody to track those ballots and pull the correct ones. In a normal RLA, you might pull several hundred ballots to audit, possibly a couple thousand. But in this presidential race, because of the number of ballots cast and the close margin...

it would require staff to pull more than a million ballots and then carefully return each ballot to its proper batch. That's why the state has chosen to just manually audit all of the ballots - you just pull all of them and it's less taxing and time-consuming for staff.

The Georgia SoS has called this an audit, a recount and a canvas. Georgia law states a recount is done by optical scanners, not by manually examining ballots. The machine in fact scans a QR code on the ballots to recount them.

Georgia law allows for manual recount only if machines are shown to be untrustworthy during tests. So calling this a recount would be contrary to what Georgia law says a recount is. In essence this will indeed now be a manual recount of the ballots...

but it's more of a hybrid between an audit and a recount. In Georgia, an audit involves a manual review of ballots, a recount does not, except under certain circumstances. So in manually counting all of the ballots in this case, Georgia is doing a combination audit/recount.

What is great about what GA is doing, is that this will finally put a spotlight on need for mandatory post-election audits that involve manually examining paper ballots. This would add important missing integrity check for elections, as I point out here https://www.politico.com/states/florida/story/2020/11/02/one-big-flaw-in-how-americans-run-elections-1333232

I hope I've made some sense in this thread. I tweeted the first post early this morning while still in bed and probably should have waited until I gathered my thoughts more. I've added to it as people have asked questions or pointed out contradictions in what I and GA are saying

Bottom line is GA is doing a quasi-audit, but not risk-a limiting audit because of how GA will conduct it (no randomly chosen ballots). It's also not a strict recount because of what GA law calls a recount - a machine reading QR codes.

I should clarify - I indicated that under GA law, recounts involve a scanner reading QR code on ballots. I was referring to ballots cast in-person on voting machines. Mail-in ballots don't have a QR code but they are still re-scanned in a recount, not manually reviewed

I'll add one more thing: Everyone should understand that a manual audit of all the ballots in Georgia WILL not match the machine count of the ballots. It will be off because people and machines do not count votes equally well. People grow fatigued and mis-read ballots...

And machines miss votes when they are calibrated poorly or when voters fill out the ballots incorrectly, including using the wrong kind of pen or pencil. Yes, differences in tallies between machine and people CAN indicate fraud. But there are many other explanations as well.