Related papers: Risk-Limiting Audits for Condorcet Elections

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 $A$,…

The well-known Condorcet Jury Theorem states that, under majority rule, the better of two alternatives is chosen with probability approaching one as the population grows. We study an asymmetric setting where voters face varying…

This paper introduces Propose or Vote (PoV), a democratic procedure for collective decision-making and elections that does not rely on a central mechanism designer. In the first stage, members of a polity choose whether to become…

Consider elections where the set of candidates is partitioned into parties, and each party must nominate exactly one candidate. The Possible President problem asks whether some candidate of a given party can become the winner of the…

From the perspective of social choice theory, ranked-choice voting (RCV) is known to have many flaws. RCV can fail to elect a Condorcet winner and is susceptible to monotonicity paradoxes and the spoiler effect, for example. We use a…

Voter control problems model situations such as an external agent trying to affect the result of an election by adding voters, for example by convincing some voters to vote who would otherwise not attend the election. Traditionally, voters…

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 theoretical and empirical results demonstrating the usefulness of voting rules for participatory democracies. We first give algorithms which efficiently elicit \epsilon-approximations to two prominent voting rules: the Borda rule…

We analyse strategic, complete information, sequential voting with ordinal preferences over the alternatives. We consider several voting mechanisms: plurality voting and approval voting with deterministic or uniform tie-breaking rules. We…

Election rules are formal processes that aggregate voters preferences, typically to select a single candidate, called the winner. Most of the election rules studied in the literature require the voters to rank the candidates from the most…

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…

We define a family of runoff rules that work as follows: voters cast approval ballots over candidates; two finalists are selected; and the winner is decided by majority. With approval-type ballots, there are various ways to select the…

A Condorcet winning set is a set of candidates such that no other candidate is preferred by at least half the voters over all members of the set. The Condorcet dimension, which is the minimum cardinality of a Condorcet winning set, is known…

We analyze the winning coalitions that arise under Bloc voting when voters preferences are single-peaked. For small numbers of candidates and numbers of winners, we determine conditions under which candidates in winning coalitions are…

The voting systems known as Alternative Vote (AV) and Single Transferable Vote (STV) are extensively used for elections in Australia, possibly more than in any other jurisdiction. Often proposed as superior alternatives to Plurality and…

I derive the probability that a vote cast in an Instant Runoff Voting election will change the election winner. I phrase that probability in terms of the candidates' expected vote totals, and then I estimate its magnitude for different…

Ranked Choice Voting (RCV) adoption is expanding across U.S. elections, but faces persistent criticism for complexity, strategic manipulation, and ballot exhaustion. We empirically test these concerns on real election data, across three…

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…

A "repeat voting" procedure is proposed, whereby voting is carried out in two identical rounds. Every voter can vote in each round, the results of the first round are made public before the second round, and the final result is determined…

We investigate the problem of computing the probability of winning in an election where voter attendance is uncertain. More precisely, we study the setting where, in addition to a total ordering of the candidates, each voter is associated…