California has two methods to verify the results of each election. Counties must use one or both to certify the results of every election.
- 1% Manual Tally: Elections officials manually tally all the ballots in 1 percent of the precincts, selected at random by the elections officials. For each race that is not included in the initial group of precincts, the elections officials count one additional precinct to include all races in the manual tally. The 1% Manual Tally is open to the public.
- Risk-Limiting Audit: Elections officials manually tally randomly selected ballots, stopping as soon as it is implausible that a full recount would show a different result than the ballots reviewed. Risk Limiting Audits are currently running as part of a pilot program in California.
