Has the Michigan risk-limiting election audit process completed for the 2020 election?

Question

Background

On January 11th, a risk-limiting election audit for the 2020 election was conducted in the State of Michigan to confirm the integrity of the 2020 election in Michigan. The beginning of the audit involved 20 10-sided dice to create a 20 digit seed to enter into an algorithm which would select which 18,000 ballots to look at as described in the linked video. The Office of the Michigan Secretary of State said on her page that the results of the audit would be published on the MDOS social media two weeks after random number generation as state below:

Following the random number generation, clerks will have two weeks to draw the corresponding ballots and review them. Once the process has been completed in each county MDOS will announce the results of the comparison between the randomly selected hand-reviewed ballots and the statewide machine-tabulated totals.

After looking on the MDOS Twitter Page and Facebook page, I found one document as a link to a news release that stated that some audits were in progress, but not completed. It is this partial completion that prompted me to ask:

Question

Has the Michigan risk-limiting audit completed for the 2020 election?

Answer 1

The official press release is here, and was apparently just released today (February 12th).

Quoting the core part of the release:

In the statewide sample, Biden received votes on 50 percent of all ballots reviewed while Trump received 48 percent. In Wayne County, which uses Dominion machines, Biden received 68 percent, while Trump received 31 percent. In Oakland County, which uses Hart machines, Biden received 57 percent while Trump received 41 percent, and in Macomb County, which uses ES&S machines, Biden received 44 percent and Trump received 54 percent.

The audit exercise was conducted by generating a statewide manifest that included the number of ballots cast in every jurisdiction, and then using a randomly generated (by rolling 10-sided dice) 20-digit number to select 18,162 of them. Clerks then retrieved ballots that had been selected in their jurisdictions and shared if it had a vote for president and, if so, who it was for. Clerks retrieved a total of 18,084 ballots total. Twenty-one clerks did not retrieve 78 ballots in their jurisdictions, meaning the sample was 78 ballots short of a complete sample. For this reason, the audit is being considered a pilot exercise.

I don't know why the extra two weeks was needed, and it's not mentioned in the press release - it's possible they were waiting for those clerks to try and track down those 78 ballots. It's also possible that the two week timeline in the initial press release was simply the amount of time the county clerks had to report, but then there was an effort to compile all the information and do whatever other checks were needed, so there was never an intent to release results two weeks later.

This release also notes:

The Bureau of Elections is compiling a full report of the results, which will be published upon completion.

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The full report was released on April 22, 2021.

The Michigan Bureau of Elections released its report today on the 250 post-election audits conducted across the state, affirming the accuracy and integrity of Michigan's November 2020 election.

Answer 2

The results of the audit are summarized here by ABC12:

An extensive audit of Michigan’s Nov. 3 election results is over and Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson said it confirms President Joe Biden’s win with only minute changes to results.

The Michigan Secretary of State’s Office conducted an extensive audit of election results in 1,300 local jurisdictions, which included hand counting more than 18,000 ballots. The hand count results only varied from machine counted results by fractions of a percentage point, Benson said.

“This statewide audit process affirms what election officials on both sides of the aisle have said since November – that Michigan’s election was conducted securely and fairly, and the results accurately reflect the will of the voters,” she said.