Related papers: Auditing a collection of races simultaneously
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…
An election audit is risk-limiting if the audit limits (to a pre-specified threshold) the chance that an erroneous electoral outcome will be certified. Extant methods for auditing instant-runoff voting (IRV) elections are either not…
Risk-limiting audits (RLAs) guarantee a high probability of correcting incorrect reported outcomes before the outcomes are certified. The most efficient use ballot-level comparison, comparing the voting system's interpretation of individual…
Before deploying a black-box model in high-stakes problems, it is important to evaluate the model's performance on sensitive subpopulations. For example, in a recidivism prediction task, we may wish to identify demographic groups for which…
The higher criticism of a family of tests starts with the individual uncorrected p-values of each test. It then requires a procedure for deciding whether the collection of p-values indicates the presence of a real effect and if possible…
ONEAudit provides more efficient risk-limiting audits than other extant methods when the voting system cannot report a cast-vote record linked to each cast card. It obviates the need for re-scanning; it is simpler and more efficient than…
Risk-limiting audits (RLAs) for many social choice functions can be reduced to testing sets of null hypotheses of the form "the average of this list is not greater than 1/2" for a collection of finite lists of nonnegative numbers. Such…
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…
We analyze Assessment Voting, a new two-round voting procedure that can be applied to binary decisions in democratic societies. In the first round, a randomly-selected number of citizens cast their vote on one of the two alternatives at…
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…
In the context of election security, a Risk-Limiting Audit (RLA) is a statistical framework that uses a minimal partial recount of the ballots to guarantee that the results of the election were correctly reported. A generalized RLA…
Instant-runoff voting (IRV) is used in several countries around the world. It requires voters to rank candidates in order of preference, and uses a counting algorithm that is more complex than systems such as first-past-the-post or scoring…
We define a family of runoff rules that work as follows: voters cast approval ballots over candidates; two finalists are selected; and the winner is decided by majority. With approval-type ballots, there are various ways to select the…
In an election in which each voter ranks all of the candidates, we consider the head-to-head results between each pair of candidates and form a labeled directed graph, called the margin graph, which contains the margin of victory of each…
For a voting ensemble that selects an odd-sized subset of the ensemble classifiers at random for each example, applies them to the example, and returns the majority vote, we show that any number of voters may minimize the error rate over an…
Taiwan's auditors have suffered from processing excessive audit data, including drawing audit evidence. This study advances sampling techniques by integrating machine learning with sampling. This machine learning integration helps avoid…
Presidential primaries are a critical part of the United States Presidential electoral process, since they are used to select the candidates in the Presidential election. While methods differ by state and party, many primaries involve…
Voting is a very general method of preference aggregation. A voting rule takes as input every voter's vote (typically, a ranking of the alternatives), and produces as output either just the winning alternative or a ranking of the…
The main risk-limiting ballot polling audit in use today, BRAVO, is designed for use when single ballots are drawn at random and a decision regarding whether to stop the audit or draw another ballot is taken after each ballot draw…
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…