Related papers: A Sharper discrepancy measure for post-election au…
There are many sources of error in counting votes: the apparent winner might not be the rightful winner. Hand tallies of the votes in a random sample of precincts can be used to test the hypothesis that a full manual recount would find a…
A collection of races in a single election can be audited as a group by auditing a random sample of batches of ballots and combining observed discrepancies in the races represented in those batches in a particular way: the maximum…
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…
With historic misses in the 2016 and 2020 US Presidential elections, interest in measuring polling errors has increased. The most common method for measuring directional errors and non-sampling excess variability during a postmortem for an…
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,…
One approach to risk-limiting audits (RLAs) compares randomly selected cast vote records (CVRs) to votes read by human auditors from the corresponding ballot cards. Historically, such methods reduce audit sample sizes by considering how…
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…
Mutual coherence is a measure of similarity between two opinions. Although the notion comes from philosophy, it is essential for a wide range of technologies, e.g., the Wahl-O-Mat system. In Germany, this system helps voters to find…
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…
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 $A$,…
We show how to use automated computation of election margins to assess the number of votes that would need to change in order to alter a parliamentary outcome for single-member preferential electorates. In the context of increasing…
We present a method and software for ballot-polling risk-limiting audits (RLAs) based on Bernoulli sampling: ballots are included in the sample with probability $p$, independently. Bernoulli sampling has several advantages: (1) it does not…
We study the complexity of (approximate) winner determination under the Monroe and Chamberlin--Courant multiwinner voting rules, which determine the set of representatives by optimizing the total (dis)satisfaction of the voters with their…
Risk-limiting audits (RLAs) are techniques for verifying the outcomes of large elections. While they provide rigorous guarantees of correctness, widespread adoption has been impeded by both efficiency concerns and the fact they offer…
The margin of victory is easy to compute for many election schemes but difficult for Instant Runoff Voting (IRV). This is important because arguments about the correctness of an election outcome usually rely on the size of the electoral…
The potential impact of non-sampling errors on election polls is well known, but measurement has focused on the margin of sampling error. Survey statisticians have long recommended measurement of total survey error by mean square error…
In recent years, in an effort to promote fairness in the election process, a wide variety of techniques and metrics have been proposed to determine whether a map is a partisan gerrymander. The most accessible measures, requiring easily…
Recently, scholars from law and political science have introduced metrics which use only election outcomes (and not district geometry) to assess the presence of partisan gerrymandering. The most high-profile example of such a tool is the…
Partisan gerrymandering is a major cause for voter disenfranchisement in United States. However, convincing US courts to adopt specific measures to quantify gerrymandering has been of limited success to date. Recently, Stephanopoulos and…
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…