Related papers: Auditing Australian Senate Ballots
This paper explains the main principles and some of the technical details for auditing the scanning and digitisation of the Australian Senate ballot papers. We give a short summary of the motivation for auditing paper ballots, explain the…
Single Transferable Vote (STV) is used to elect candidates to the 76 seat Australian Senate across six states and two territories. These eight STV contests are counted using a combination of ballot scanners, manual data entry and tabulation…
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…
The existing system for determining election results in Australia is, for the most part, secure, accurate and understandable by the average voter. This thesis explores the design of electronic voting systems designed to achieve these same…
It is now widely accepted that errors in spreadsheets are both common and potentially dangerous. Further research has taken place to investigate how frequently these errors occur, what impact they have, how the risk of spreadsheet errors…
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…
The usual aim of spreadsheet audit is to verify correctness. There are two problems with this: first, it is often difficult to tell whether the spreadsheets in question are correct, and second, even if they are, they may still give the…
The Pret a Voter cryptographic voting system was designed to be flexible and to offer voters a familiar and easy voting experience. In this paper we present a case study of our efforts to adapt Pret a Voter to the idiosyncrasies of…
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 study the multifaceted question of how to sample approval elections in a meaningful way. Our analysis aims to discern the properties of various statistical cultures (both established and new ones). Based on the map-of-elections framework…
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…
Single Transferable Vote (STV) counting, used in several jurisdictions in Australia, is a system for choosing multiple election winners given voters' preferences over candidates. There are a variety of different versions of STV legislated…
Testing is a vital part of software development, and spreadsheets are like any other software in this respect. This paper discusses the testing of spreadsheets in the light of one practitioner's experience. It considers the concept of…
Voting rules based on evaluation inputs rather than preference orders have been recently proposed, like majority judgement, range voting or approval voting. Traditionally, probabilistic analysis of voting rules supposes the use of…
While existing literature on electronic voting has extensively addressed verifiability of voting protocols, the vulnerability of electoral rolls in large public elections remains a critical concern. To ensure integrity of electoral rolls,…
We study computational problems for two popular parliamentary voting procedures: the amendment procedure and the successive procedure. While finding successful manipulations or agenda controls is tractable for both procedures, our…
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…
Motivated by the increasing interest of the control community towards social sciences and the study of opinion formation and belief systems, in this paper we address the problem of exploiting voting data for inferring the underlying…
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…
Roll call data are widely used to assess legislators' preferences and ideology, as well as test theories of legislative behavior. In particular, roll call data is often used to determine whether the revealed preferences of legislators are…