By Amanda Gonzalez

You don’t build a secure election system overnight. You build it over years — layer by layer — reinforcing it with stronger safeguards, better technology and more transparency.

In Colorado, one of those safeguards is a little-known but critically important process called a Risk-Limiting Audit (RLA). It’s math-driven, public and one of the most powerful tools we have to verify election outcomes. Election security experts across the country view it as a best practice.

But if you read Jon Caldara’s recent column, you might think otherwise.

Caldara says he doesn’t want to relitigate 2020 and that he’s just concerned about public confidence, that it’s not about whether or not the system works, but about whether voters believe it works.

I will certainly agree that trust is essential to democracy.

Where his column goes wrong is in both misunderstanding how Colorado’s election audits actually work and identifying the wrong root cause of voters’ mistrust.

Let’s start with the facts. Colorado implemented the first statewide Risk-Limiting Audit in the nation in 2017, under Republican Secretary of State Wayne Williams. Election officials, security researchers, and good-government organizations from across the country came to observe because it was a groundbreaking step in election integrity.

The system had broad bipartisan support. It had the backing of election administrators. And it had the enthusiastic support of leading election security experts, who have consistently described RLAs as the most scientifically reliable way to verify election outcomes.

That first audit worked exactly as designed. And we’ve been using that model ever since.

Here’s how it works:

Risk-limiting audits rely on statistics, not guesswork. Bipartisan teams compare voter-marked paper ballots against the machine-counted results to confirm the tabulation of votes is correct.

Transparency requires openness, which is why RLAs are completed in public. Private audits by a third-party are not.

Some critics point to the selection of races as too subjective, and they want us to choose the closest races for auditing. But here’s where the RLA really shines:

Races with large margins require fewer ballots to audit to confirm statistical certainty on the outcomes; races with smaller margins require more ballots to audit. But whether you audit the close race or the not-so-close race, the math is the same. You’ve reached the same risk threshold. That’s how math works.

That isn’t bureaucrats avoiding work. It’s the math doing exactly what it’s supposed to do. It’s also your election officials being good stewards of taxpayer dollars. In 2024, I returned $2 million to my county’s general fund by spending responsibly, which isn’t possible if we’re spending all those savings to draw out the audit.

And here’s another RLA fact that’s often missed by those who aren’t deep in the weeds on this stuff — or those who are committed to their own political narrative — every ballot selected for the audit includes votes for every contest on the ballot. We’re not just checking the selected contests. The ballots to be audited are chosen through a randomized selection process conducted in a public meeting, and the audit is independently verifiable using the open-source software.

That’s a level of transparency most financial audits would envy.

The reason corporations need outside auditors is because they created the records being audited. In an RLA, you — the voters — created the audited records. They’re already independent evidence.

None of this means election officials should stop improving the system. Good administrators are always looking for ways to strengthen transparency and accountability, and election officials across Colorado regularly collaborate with security experts and policymakers to do exactly that. 

We also have to be honest about something Caldara’s column ignores: the RLA was never the reason some voters distrust elections.

We could design the most airtight audit imaginable tomorrow and it would not persuade people who are invested in The Big Lie, those who have been told — repeatedly and falsely — the system is rigged.

That mistrust didn’t grow organically. It was cultivated through years of deliberate disinformation about elections that have been proven secure over and over again.

When the problem is people are being told not to believe evidence, simply producing more evidence isn’t enough.

What actually builds trust is leaders with platforms taking the time to understand the systems they criticize. Leaders who talk to election administrators, statisticians and security experts before declaring something is broken. Leaders who explain how elections actually work instead of amplifying misconceptions.

Election officials are doing their part. Across Colorado, counties regularly invite the public inside election facilities, answer questions and welcome observers from all political backgrounds to watch the process firsthand.

That openness is something we should celebrate.

Colorado’s election system didn’t become one of the most trusted and accessible in the nation by accident. It was built through decades of bipartisan work by legislators, election officials, researchers, advocates and tens of thousands of election workers from every political party.

And we’re still improving it.

But meaningful reform has to start from an honest understanding of the system we already have — and from a commitment to facts instead of political theater.

Anything less isn’t about strengthening elections. It’s just noise.

Amanda Gonzalez serves as the Jefferson County clerk and recorder.