Of course, Rivest’s method assumes that paper ballots exist to be checked in an audit in the first place. In some states, including Pennsylvania, they don’t: Much of the Quaker State uses so-called direct record electronic (DRE) voting machines. Those machines have not only been found to be vulnerable in many cases to physical access hacks that can infect them with malware in just seven minutes, but they lack any actual paper ballot filled out by a voter. Auditing them may be possible, but would require more skilled and less certain computer forensics work.

Pennsylvania’s lack of a paper ballots likely mean no easy audit can call into question the result of this month’s election, even if anyone believed that the election had been effectively hacked. After all, Clinton would have had to win Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, which went to Trump, as well as Michigan, whose votes are still being counted. But a quick, relatively cheap statistical audit could at the very least confirm Trump’s victory, putting to rest an uncertainty that weakens confidence in the federal government no matter who the president is.

While there are still a few days left for Clinton to request recounts—which would require her campaign paying for them—election-watchers like Smith and Rivest say the real lesson of the 2016 election and the hacker doubts surrounding it is that American elections should be both auditable and audited. And not as a special measure when one party asks for it, but whenever the vote comes within a certain statistically chosen margin. That means both replacing bad voting machines that don’t have a paper trail, and changing state laws around the country to give automatic election audits real teeth.