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Several election districts in the US have recently moved to ranked-choice voting (RCV) to decide the results of local elections. RCV allows voters to rank their choices, and the results are computed in rounds, eliminating one candidate at a…
Bugs, misconfiguration, and malware can cause ballot-marking devices (BMDs) to print incorrect votes. Several approaches to testing BMDs have been proposed. In logic and accuracy testing (LAT) and parallel or live testing, auditors input…
It has recently been discovered that the conclusions of many highly influential econometrics studies can be overturned by removing a very small fraction of their samples (often less than $0.5\%$). These conclusions are typically based on…
Risk Limiting Dispatch (RLD) was proposed recently as a mechanism that utilizes information and market recourse to reduce reserve capacity requirements, emissions and achieve other system operator objectives. It induces a set of simple…
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…
In variable or graph selection problems, finding a right-sized model or controlling the number of false positives is notoriously difficult. Recently, a meta-algorithm called Stability Selection was proposed that can provide reliable…
Many voter-verifiable, coercion-resistant schemes have been proposed, but even the most carefully designed systems necessarily leak information via the announced result. In corner cases, this may be problematic. For example, if all the…
A powerful approach to detecting erroneous data is to check which potentially dirty data records are incompatible with a user's domain knowledge. Previous approaches allow the user to specify domain knowledge in the form of logical…
Existing methods for adapting large language models (LLMs) to new tasks are not suited to multi-task adaptation because they modify all the model weights -- causing destructive interference between tasks. The resulting effects, such as…
In majority voting dynamics, a group of $n$ agents in a social network are asked for their preferred candidate in a future election between two possible choices. At each time step, a new poll is taken, and each agent adjusts their vote…
Drawing a random sample of ballots to conduct a risk-limiting audit generally requires knowing how the ballots cast in an election are organized into groups, for instance, how many containers of ballots there are in all and how many ballots…
As machine learning models are increasingly embedded into society through high-stakes decision-making, selecting the right algorithm for a given task, audience, and sector presents a critical challenge, particularly in the context of…
Adaptive random testing (ART) improves the failure-detection effectiveness of random testing by leveraging properties of the clustering of failure-causing inputs of most faulty programs: ART uses a sampling mechanism that evenly spreads…
Partisan gerrymandering poses a threat to democracy. Moreover, the complexity of the districting task may exceed human capacities. One potential solution is using computational models to automate the districting process by optimizing…
Errors are inevitable in the implementation of any complex process. Here we examine the effect of random errors on Single Transferable Vote (STV) elections, a common approach to deciding multi-seat elections. It is usually expected that…
We study randomized algorithms for constrained optimization, in abstract frameworks that include, in strictly increasing generality: convex programming; LP-type problems; violator spaces; and a setting we introduce, consistent spaces. Such…
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…
While test-time scaling has enabled large language models to solve highly difficult tasks, state-of-the-art results come at exorbitant compute costs. These inefficiencies can be attributed to the miscalibration of post-trained language…
Scam detection remains a critical challenge in cybersecurity as adversaries craft messages that evade automated filters. We propose a Hierarchical Scam Detection System (HSDS) that combines a lightweight multi-model voting front end with a…
Reliant on too many experiments to learn good actions, current Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms have limited applicability in real-world settings, which can be too expensive to allow exploration. We propose an algorithm for batch RL,…