Related papers: RAIRE: Risk-Limiting Audits for IRV Elections
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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) 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…
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…
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…
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…
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 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…
Risk-limiting audits (RLAs) can provide routine, affirmative evidence that reported election outcomes are correct by checking a random sample of cast ballots. An efficient RLA requires checking relatively few ballots. Here we construct…
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…
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…
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…
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 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…
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…