Related papers: DiffSum - A Simple Post-Election Risk-Limiting Aud…
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…
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…
We propose a simple common framework for Risk-Limiting and Bayesian (polling) audits for two-candidate plurality elections. Using it, we derive an expression for the general Bayesian audit; in particular, we do not restrict the prior to a…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Risk-limiting audits (RLAs) are post-election auditing procedures that rigorously guarantee a specified maximum probability that an incorrect electoral outcome will not be detected. Aside from ready access to physical ballots, known RLAs…
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…
Elections where electors rank the candidates (or a subset of the candidates) in order of preference allow the collection of more information about the electors' intent. The most widely used election of this type is Instant-Runoff Voting…
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…
In this paper, a new method of detection of election fraud is proposed. This method is based on the calculation of the ratio of two standard normal random variables; estimation of parameters of obtained sample and comparison of these…
In this paper, we study the distortion bounds for voting mechanisms in multi-winner elections in general metric spaces. Our study pertains to the case in which each voter only reports her favorite candidate amongst $m$ possible choices.…
Risk-limiting audits (RLAs) are rigorous statistical procedures meant to detect invalid election results. RLAs examine paper ballots cast during the election to statistically assess the possibility of a disagreement between the winner…
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…
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)…
Diffusion Large Language Models (dLLMs) represent a new paradigm beyond autoregressive modeling, offering competitive performance while naturally enabling a flexible decoding process. Specifically, dLLMs can generate tokens at arbitrary…
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…
Risk-limiting audits (RLAs) are expected to strengthen the public confidence in the correctness of an election outcome. We hypothesize that this is not always the case, in part because for large margins between the winner and the runner-up,…