Related papers: A Sharper discrepancy measure for post-election au…
Risk-limiting post-election audits limit the chance of certifying an electoral outcome if the outcome is not what a full hand count would show. Building on previous work, we report on pilot risk-limiting audits in four elections during 2008…
In this work we study the metric distortion problem in voting theory under a limited amount of ordinal information. Our primary contribution is threefold. First, we consider mechanisms which perform a sequence of pairwise comparisons…
We consider a linear ill-posed equation in the Hilbert space setting. Multiple independent unbiased measurements of the right hand side are available. A natural approach is to take the average of the measurements as an approximation of the…
Empirical research in economics often examines the behavior of agents located in a geographic space. In such cases, statistical inference is complicated by the interdependence of economic outcomes across locations. A common approach to…
A voting rule decides on a probability distribution over a set of m alternatives, based on rankings of those alternatives provided by agents. We assume that agents have cardinal utility functions over the alternatives, but voting rules have…
For more than a century, election officials across the United States have inspected voting machines before elections using a procedure called Logic and Accuracy Testing (LAT). This procedure consists of election officials casting a test…
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…
In the metric distortion problem, a set of voters and candidates lie in a common metric space, and a committee of $k$ candidates must be elected. The objective is to minimize a social cost, defined as a function of the distances between…
We investigate how robust the results of committee elections are to small changes in the input preference orders, depending on the voting rules used. We find that for typical rules the effect of making a single swap of adjacent candidates…
Several researchers have proposed minimisation of maximum mean discrepancy (MMD) as a method to quantise probability measures, i.e., to approximate a target distribution by a representative point set. We consider sequential algorithms that…
We study sorting of permutations by random swaps if each comparison gives the wrong result with some fixed probability $p<1/2$. We use this process as prototype for the behaviour of randomized, comparison-based optimization heuristics in…
Counting votes is complex and error-prone. Several statistical methods have been developed to assess election accuracy by manually inspecting randomly selected physical ballots. Two 'principled' methods are risk-limiting audits (RLAs) and…
In MT evaluation, pairwise comparisons are conducted to identify the better system. In conducting the comparison, the experimenter must allocate a budget to collect Direct Assessment (DA) judgments. We provide a cost effective way to spend…
Motivated by putting empirical work based on (synthetic) election data on a more solid mathematical basis, we analyze six distances among elections, including, e.g., the challenging-to-compute but very precise swap distance and the distance…
Election rules are formal processes that aggregate voters preferences, typically to select a single candidate, called the winner. Most of the election rules studied in the literature require the voters to rank the candidates from the most…
Bugs, misconfiguration, and malware can cause ballot-marking devices (BMDs) to print incorrect votes. Several approaches to testing BMDs have been proposed. In logic and accuracy testing (LAT) and parallel or live testing, auditors input…
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 explore the Declination, a new metric intended to detect partisan gerrymandering. We consider instances in which each district has equal turnout, the maximum turnout to minimum turnout is bounded, and turnout is unrestricted. For each of…
Elections involving a very large voter population often lead to outcomes that surprise many. This is particularly important for the elections in which results affect the economy of a sizable population. A better prediction of the true…
BRAVO, the most widely tried method for risk-limiting election audits, cannot accommodate sampling without replacement or stratified sampling, which can improve efficiency and may be required by law. It applies only to ballot-polling…