monica childers showed the ropeo ocal officials. she's with a non-partisan, non- profit called "voting works" focused on building secure, open source voting and auditing systems. >> so, whenever we go into a state, we try and do a number of local pilots of the process, so the election administrators can wet and actually gerience feet with what we're doing. >> reporter: these audits typically begin with volunteer voters rolling ten 10-sided dice to generate a truly random number. >> so why do we use dice? therare several reasons. first of all, we want the audit to be random. we wanunpredictability. we want genuine probability so that we can do probability calculations, but then we alsoy want transpared reproducibility and to the extent possible public rticipation. >> reporter: the random number is fed into stark's formula, or algorithm. so is the number of ballots for each candidate and the desired accuracy. the formula determines how many randomly selected ballots need to be located and double-checked in order to give certainty to t

monica childers is confident the audit would have caught any meaningful discrepancy, no matter the cause. >> it could be that an election was hacked, it couldbe the programming, it co thatug in the the eye of the scanner got some dirt on it and so it wasn't scanning as well as it was at the beginning of the process, it doesn't matter. any of those things can be the cause of tabulation error, if that tabulation error is great enough that it would havech ged the outcome, a risk- limiting audit will catch it. >> reporter: but will it? georgia ismong 14 states using a hybrid between paper and electronic voting maines-- touchscreen computers that print marked ballots. and with a computer between voter and ballot, there is no true record of what choices appeared on the screen, or whether what's in the q.r. or barcode read by the tabulating scanner matches the voter's choices. >> if ballot marking devices were used to mark the bulk of t the ballotn we're never going to know what the right outcome is, even a full hand count of the paper isn't going to real that necessarily. that said, it's still