Related papers: RiLACS: Risk-Limiting Audits via Confidence Sequen…
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…
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…
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…
Indian Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs) will be fitted with printers that produce Voter-Verifiable Paper Audit Trails (VVPATs) in time for the 2019 general election. VVPATs provide evidence that each vote was recorded as the voter…
In the criminal legal context, risk assessment algorithms are touted as data-driven, well-tested tools. Studies known as validation tests are typically cited by practitioners to show that a particular risk assessment algorithm has…
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…
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…
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…
Colorado conducted risk-limiting tabulation audits (RLAs) across the state in 2017, including both ballot-level comparison audits and ballot-polling audits. Those audits only covered contests restricted to a single county; methods to…
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…
There are many sources of error in counting votes: the apparent winner might not be the rightful winner. Hand tallies of the votes in a random sample of precincts can be used to test the hypothesis that a full manual recount would find a…
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…
Financial statement auditing is conducted under a risk-based evidence approach to obtain reasonable assurance. In practice, auditors often perform additional sampling or related procedures when an initial sample does not provide a…
Foundation models often generate unreliable answers, while heuristic uncertainty estimators fail to fully distinguish correct from incorrect outputs, causing users to accept erroneous answers without any statistical guarantee. We address…
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…
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…
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…
Post-election audits use the discrepancy between machine counts and a hand tally of votes in a random sample of precincts to infer whether error affected the electoral outcome. The maximum relative overstatement of pairwise margins (MRO)…
Presidential primaries are a critical part of the United States Presidential electoral process, since they are used to select the candidates in the Presidential election. While methods differ by state and party, many primaries involve…
Within the domain of data mining, one critical objective is the discovery of sequential rules with high utility. The goal is to discover sequential rules that exhibit both high utility and strong confidence, which are valuable in real-world…