Related papers: Conservative statistical post-election audits
Post-election audits use the discrepancy between machine counts and a hand tally of votes in a random sample of precincts to infer whether error affected the electoral outcome. The maximum relative overstatement of pairwise margins (MRO)…
We develop conservative tests for the mean of a bounded population under stratified sampling and apply them to risk-limiting post-election audits. The tests are ``anytime valid'' under sequential sampling, allowing optional stopping in each…
This article * provides an overview of post-election audit sampling research and compares various approaches to calculating post-election audit sample sizes, focusing on risklimiting audits, * discusses fundamental concepts common to all…
Accurately determining the outcome of an election is a complex task with many potential sources of error, ranging from software glitches in voting machines to procedural lapses to outright fraud. Risk-limiting audits (RLA) are statistically…
A method is given for quantitatively rating the social acceptance of different options which are the matter of a preferential vote. In contrast to a previous article, here the individual votes are allowed to be incomplete, that is, they…
Financial statement auditing is conducted under a risk-based evidence approach to obtain reasonable assurance. In practice, auditors often perform additional sampling or related procedures when an initial sample does not provide a…
Tabulation audits for an election provide statistical evidence that a reported contest outcome is "correct" (meaning that the tabulation of votes was properly performed), or else the tabulation audit determines the correct outcome. Stark…
Predicting the winner of an election is a favorite problem both for news media pundits and computational social choice theorists. Since it is often infeasible to elicit the preferences of all the voters in a typical prediction scenario, a…
We propose a simple risk-limiting audit for elections, ClipAudit. To determine whether candidate A (the reported winner) actually beat candidate B in a plurality election, ClipAudit draws ballots at random, without replacement, until either…
Despite extensive theoretical research on proportionality in approval-based multiwinner voting, its impact on which committees and candidates can be selected in practice remains poorly understood. We address this gap by (i) analyzing the…
We study multiwinner elections with approval-based preferences. An instance of a multiwinner election consists of a set of alternatives, a population of voters---each voter approves a subset of alternatives, and the desired committee size…
Risk-limiting post election audits guarantee a high probability of correcting incorrect election results, independent of why the result was incorrect. Ballot-polling audits select ballots at random and interpret those ballots as evidence…
Lu and Boutilier proposed a novel approach based on "minimax regret" to use classical score based voting rules in the setting where preferences can be any partial (instead of complete) orders over the set of alternatives. We show here that…
The margin of victory of an election is a useful measure to capture the robustness of an election outcome. It also plays a crucial role in determining the sample size of various algorithms in post election audit, polling etc. In this work,…
We present an approximate sampling framework and discuss how risk-limiting audits can compensate for these approximations, while maintaining their "risk-limiting" properties. Our framework is general and can compensate for counting mistakes…
We design a recursive measure of voting power based on partial as well as full voting efficacy. Classical measures, by contrast, incorporate solely full efficacy. We motivate our design by representing voting games using a division lattice…
This paper considers elections in which voters choose one candidate each, independently according to known probability distributions. A candidate receiving a strict majority (absolute or relative, depending on the version) wins. After the…
We propose new methods of electoral statistics. With their help, we study transcripts of vote counting in municipal elections. We construct and apply effective statistical tests to detect the ballot stuffing at the level of individual…
We survey the design of elections that are resilient to attempted interference by third parties. For example, suppose votes have been cast in an election between two candidates, and then each vote is randomly changed with a small…
This paper presents DiffSum, a simple post-election risk-limiting ballot-polling audit for two-candidate plurality elections. DiffSum sequentially draws ballots (without replacement) until the numbers $a$, $b$, of votes for candidates $A$,…