Related papers: 3+ Seat Risk-Limiting Audits for Single Transferab…
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…
U.S. elections rely heavily on computers such as voter registration databases, electronic pollbooks, voting machines, scanners, tabulators, and results reporting websites. These introduce digital threats to election outcomes. Risk-limiting…
Criteria for a good voting system have been given particularly careful scrutiny in recent years, with general agreement that the core values are fair results, voter power and choice, and local representation. This paper reexamines the basic…
One approach to risk-limiting audits (RLAs) compares randomly selected cast vote records (CVRs) to votes read by human auditors from the corresponding ballot cards. Historically, such methods reduce audit sample sizes by considering how…
We describe the vote package in R, which implements the plurality (or first-past-the-post), two-round runoff, score, approval and single transferable vote (STV) electoral systems, as well as methods for selecting the Condorcet winner and…
Risk-limiting audits (RLAs) guarantee a high probability of correcting incorrect reported outcomes before the outcomes are certified. The most efficient use ballot-level comparison, comparing the voting system's interpretation of individual…
Single Transferable Vote (STV) counting, used in several jurisdictions in Australia, is a system for choosing multiple election winners given voters' preferences among candidates. The system is complex and it is not always obvious how an…
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…
Proportional representation plays a crucial role in electoral systems. In ordinal elections, where voters rank candidates based on their preferences, the Single Transferable Vote (STV) is the most widely used proportional voting method. STV…
Ranked Choice Voting (RCV) and Single Transferable Voting (STV) are widely valued; but are complex to understand due to intricate per-round vote transfers. Questions like determining how far a candidate is from winning or identifying…
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…
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…
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 ballot exhaustion in multiwinner single transferable vote (STV) elections using a dataset of 1,070 Scottish local government elections comprising over 5.4 million ballots. While ballot exhaustion has been studied extensively in…
Risk-limiting audits (RLAs) for many social choice functions can be reduced to testing sets of null hypotheses of the form "the average of this list is not greater than 1/2" for a collection of finite lists of nonnegative numbers. Such…
The methods of single transferable vote (STV) and sequential ranked-choice voting (RCV) are different methods for electing a set of winners in multiwinner elections. STV is a classical voting method that has been widely used internationally…
Limited Voting (LV) is an approval-based method for multi-winner elections where all ballots are required to have a same fixed size. While it appears to be used as voting method in corporate governance and has some political applications,…
We analyze a type of voting paradox which we term an involvement paradox, in which a candidate who loses an election could be made into a winner if more of the candidate's non-supporters participated in the election, or a winner could be…
Single Transferable Vote (STV) counting, used in several jurisdictions in Australia, is a system for choosing multiple election winners given voters' preferences over candidates. There are a variety of different versions of STV legislated…