Related papers: Doing More With Less: Mismatch-Based Risk-Limiting…
A Risk-Limiting Audit (RLA) is a statistical election tabulation audit with a rigorous error guarantee. We present ballot polling RLA PROVIDENCE, an audit with the efficiency of MINERVA and flexibility of BRAVO. We prove that PROVIDENCE is…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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)…
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…
The problem of finding the optimal portfolio for investors is called the portfolio optimization problem. Such problem mainly concerns the expectation and variability of return (i.e., mean and variance). Although the variance would be the…
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…
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,…
Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) is a practical, scalable way to improve large language models on math, code, and other structured tasks. However, we argue that many headline RLVR gains are not yet well validated…
Machine learning (ML) models used in prediction and classification tasks may display performance disparities across population groups determined by sensitive attributes (e.g., race, sex, age). We consider the problem of evaluating the…
Low-rank adaptation (LoRA) is a standard approach for fine-tuning large language models, yet its many variants report conflicting empirical gains, often on the same benchmarks. We show that these contradictions arise from a single…
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…
Cluster randomized trials (CRTs) randomly assign an intervention to groups of individuals (e.g., clinics or communities) and measure outcomes on individuals in those groups. While offering many advantages, this experimental design…
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…
We propose an approach for preventing unsafe or otherwise low-quality large language model (LLM) outputs by leveraging the stochasticity of LLMs, an approach we call Repeated Checking with Regeneration (RCR). In this system, LLM checkers…
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…