Related papers: Stylish Risk-Limiting Audits in Practice
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…
Constructing efficient risk-limiting audits (RLAs) for multiwinner single transferable vote (STV) elections is a challenging problem. An STV RLA is designed to statistically verify that the reported winners of an election did indeed win…
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…
The main risk-limiting ballot polling audit in use today, BRAVO, is designed for use when single ballots are drawn at random and a decision regarding whether to stop the audit or draw another ballot is taken after each ballot draw…
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), an ingredient in evidence-based elections, are increasingly common. They are a rigorous statistical means of ensuring that electoral results are correct, usually without having to perform an expensive full…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Machine learning based decision-support tools in criminal justice systems are subjects of intense discussions and academic research. There are important open questions about the utility and fairness of such tools. Academic researchers often…
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…
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…
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…
We introduce the notion of a risk-limiting financial auditing (RLFA): given $N$ transactions, the goal is to estimate the total misstated monetary fraction~($m^*$) to a given accuracy $\epsilon$, with confidence $1-\delta$. We do this by…
Multi-agent LLM debate improves factuality and reasoning, but most recipes pick a fixed round count, over-spending on easy items and under-spending on hard ones. We adapt Wald's Sequential Probability Ratio Test (SPRT) as a plug-in compute…
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 $A$,…
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)…