Related papers: Ahead of the Count: An Algorithm for Probabilistic…
The margin of victory is easy to compute for many election schemes but difficult for Instant Runoff Voting (IRV). This is important because arguments about the correctness of an election outcome usually rely on the size of the electoral…
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…
We present the core support criterion, a voting criterion satisfied by Instant Runoff Voting (IRV) that is analogous to the Condorcet criterion but reflective of a different majority rule philosophy. Condorcet methods can be thought of as…
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…
Instant Runoff Voting (IRV) is used in elections for many political offices around the world. It allows voters to specify their preferences among candidates as a ranking. We identify a generalization of the rule, called Approval-IRV, that…
Instant runoff voting (IRV) has recently gained popularity as an alternative to plurality voting for political elections, with advocates claiming a range of advantages, including that it produces more moderate winners than plurality and…
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…
Instant runoff voting (IRV) is an increasingly-popular alternative to traditional plurality voting in which voters submit rankings over the candidates rather than single votes. In practice, elections using IRV often restrict the ballot…
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…
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…
Instant-runoff voting (IRV) is often used when voters rank candidates rather than choosing only one favourite. We study IRV under graph-induced metric preferences where each vertex of an unweighted undirected graph hosts one voter and is…
This paper considers elections in which voters choose one candidate each, independently according to known probability distributions. A candidate receiving a strict majority (absolute or relative, depending on the version) wins. After the…
We analyze the susceptibility of instant runoff voting (IRV) to a lesser-studied paradox known as a \emph{reinforcement paradox}, which occurs when candidate $X$ wins under IRV in two distinct elections but $X$ loses in the combined…
AWAIRE is one of two extant methods for conducting risk-limiting audits of instant-runoff voting (IRV) elections. In principle AWAIRE can audit IRV contests with any number of candidates, but the original implementation incurred memory and…
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…
We present novel methods for predicting the outcome of large elections. Our first algorithm uses a diffusion process to model the time uncertainty inherent in polls taken with substantial calendar time left to the election. Our second model…
Recent research on instant runoff voting (IRV) shows that it exhibits a striking combinatorial property in one-dimensional preference spaces: there is an "exclusion zone" around the median voter such that if a candidate from the exclusion…
Various risk-limiting audit (RLA) methods have been developed for instant-runoff voting (IRV) elections. A recent method, AWAIRE, is the first efficient approach that can take advantage of but does not require cast vote records (CVRs).…
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…
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…