Related papers: Next Steps for the Colorado Risk-Limiting Audit (C…
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…
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,…
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…
Ranked voting systems, such as instant-runoff voting (IRV) and single transferable vote (STV), are used in many places around the world. They are more complex than plurality and scoring rules, presenting a challenge for auditing their…
Single Transferable Vote (STV) elections are a principled approach to electing multiple candidates in a single election. Each ballot has a starting value of 1, and a candidate is elected if they gather a total vote value more than a defined…
Risk-limiting audits (RLAs), an ingredient in evidence-based elections, are increasingly common. They are a rigorous statistical means of ensuring that electoral results are correct, usually without having to perform an expensive full…
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…
In this paper, we apply techniques of ensemble analysis to understand the political baseline for Congressional representation in Colorado. We generate a large random sample of reasonable redistricting plans and determine the partisan…
Stratified sampling can be useful in risk-limiting audits (RLAs), for instance, to accommodate heterogeneous voting equipment or laws that mandate jurisdictions draw their audit samples independently. We combine the union-intersection tests…
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…
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…
The City and County of San Francisco, CA, has used Instant Runoff Voting (IRV) for some elections since 2004. This report describes the first ever process pilot of Risk Limiting Audits for IRV, for the San Francisco District Attorney's race…
Conformal prediction offers a distribution-free framework for constructing prediction sets with finite-sample coverage. Yet, efficiently leveraging multiple conformity scores to reduce prediction set size remains a major open challenge.…
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…
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…
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 scaling law of Large Language Models (LLMs) reveals a power-law relationship, showing diminishing return on performance as model scale increases. While training LLMs from scratch is resource-intensive, fine-tuning a pre-trained model…
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…
Due to the scale and complexity of cloud systems, a system failure would trigger an "alert storm", i.e., massive correlated alerts. Although these alerts can be traced back to a few root causes, the overwhelming number makes it infeasible…
An electoral quick count is a statistical procedure whose main objective is to obtain a relatively small but representative sample of all the polling stations in a certain election, and to measure the uncertainty about the final result…