Related papers: ClipAudit: A Simple Risk-Limiting Post-Election Au…
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 $A$,…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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 a significant tool in increasing confidence in the accuracy of elections. They consist of randomized algorithms which check that an election's vote tally, as reported by a vote tabulation system, corresponds…
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…
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…
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…
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,…
Risk-limiting audits (RLAs) offer a statistical guarantee: if a full manual tally of the paper ballots would show that the reported election outcome is wrong, an RLA has a known minimum chance of leading to a full manual tally. RLAs…
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 an increasingly important method for checking that the reported outcome of an election is, in fact, correct. Indeed, their use is increasingly being legislated. While effective methods for RLAs have been…
Constructing efficient risk-limiting audits (RLAs) for multiwinner single transferable vote (STV) elections is a challenging problem. An STV RLA is designed to statistically verify that the reported winners of an election did indeed win…
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…
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…
U.S. elections rely heavily on computers such as voter registration databases, electronic pollbooks, voting machines, scanners, tabulators, and results reporting websites. These introduce digital threats to election outcomes. Risk-limiting…