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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…

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…

We show the security risk associated with using machine learning classifiers in United States election tabulators. The central classification task in election tabulation is deciding whether a mark does or does not appear on a bubble…

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 $A$,…

A central requirement of the European Union's Digital Services Act (DSA) is that online platforms undergo internal and external audits. A key component of these audits is the assessment of systemic risks, including the dissemination of…

Regulatory efforts to protect against algorithmic bias have taken on increased urgency with rapid advances in large language models (LLMs), which are machine learning models that can achieve performance rivaling human experts on a wide…

Document layout analysis (DLA) aims to divide a document image into different types of regions. DLA plays an important role in the document content understanding and information extraction systems. Exploring a method that can use less data…

In this paper, we study learning in probabilistic domains where the learner may receive incorrect labels but can improve the reliability of labels by repeatedly sampling them. In such a setting, one faces the problem of whether the fixed…

To keep card sorting with a lot of cards concise, a common strategy for gauging mental models involves presenting participants with fewer randomly selected cards instead of the full set. This is a decades-old practice, but its effects…

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…

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…

Credit risk scorecards are logistic regression models, fitted to large and complex data sets, employed by the financial industry to model the probability of default of a potential customer. In order to ensure that a scorecard remains a…

Machine learning has automated much of financial fraud detection, notifying firms of, or even blocking, questionable transactions instantly. However, data imbalance starves traditionally trained models of the content necessary to detect…

The standard voting methods in the United States, plurality and ranked choice (or instant runoff) voting, are susceptible to significant voting failures. These flaws include Condorcet and majority failures as well as monotonicity and…

Test collections are information-retrieval tools that allow researchers to quickly and easily evaluate ranking algorithms. While test collections have become an integral part of IR research, the process of data creation involves significant…

Almost every software system provides configuration options to tailor the system to the target platform and application scenario. Often, this configurability renders the analysis of every individual system configuration infeasible. To…

We study how a Reinforcement Learning (RL) system can remain sample-efficient when learning from an imperfect model of the environment. This is particularly challenging when the learning system is resource-constrained and in continual…

Learning with noisy labels has gained increasing attention because the inevitable imperfect labels in real-world scenarios can substantially hurt the deep model performance. Recent studies tend to regard low-loss samples as clean ones and…

Georgia was central to efforts to overturn the 2020 Presidential election, including a call from then-president Trump to Georgia Secretary of State Raffensperger asking Raffensperger to `find' 11,780 votes. Raffensperger has maintained that…

Overseas military personnel often face significant challenges in participating in elections due to the slow pace of traditional mail systems, which can result in ballots missing crucial deadlines. While internet-based voting offers a faster…