Post‑election audits are meant to provide a qualitative and quantitative check on the entire process—verifying not just counts, but also procedural compliance, system security, and record completeness—before certification is finalized or ratified. In practice, the 2020 cycle featured a patchwork of audits: some narrowly focused risk‑limiting audits sampling a subset of ballots, others more comprehensive forensic audits initiated by legislatures or courts, and still others labeled “audits” that were little more than rescans of machine‑tally databases.

This subsection reviews the scope, timing, and independence of these audits, highlighting cases where key logs, ballot images, or system configurations had already been altered or destroyed before auditors gained access, thereby limiting their ability to inform certification decisions. It also examines how audit findings—when adverse—were handled by state officials and whether they were meaningfully integrated into the certification record.