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Vote-tabulation audits can be used to collect evidence that the set of winners of an election (the outcome) according to the machine count is correct — that it agrees with the outcome that a full hand count of the audit trail would show. The strength of evidence is measured by the p-value of the hypothesis that the machine outcome is wrong. Smaller p-values are stronger evidence that the outcome is correct.
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Higgins et al. (2011) studied this question.
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