Related papers: The ATHENA Class of Risk-Limiting Ballot Polling A…
BRAVO, the most widely tried method for risk-limiting election audits, cannot accommodate sampling without replacement or stratified sampling, which can improve efficiency and may be required by law. It applies only to ballot-polling…
A Risk-Limiting Audit (RLA) is a statistical election tabulation audit with a rigorous error guarantee. We present ballot polling RLA PROVIDENCE, an audit with the efficiency of MINERVA and flexibility of BRAVO. We prove that PROVIDENCE is…
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…
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…
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…
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 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…
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…
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…
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 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…
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…
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,…
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…
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…
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…
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) 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…
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…
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…