Related papers: Graph-Based Audits for Meek Single Transferable Vo…
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…
Risk-limiting audits (RLAs) are expected to strengthen the public confidence in the correctness of an election outcome. We hypothesize that this is not always the case, in part because for large margins between the winner and the runner-up,…
Risk-limiting audits (RLAs) can use information about which ballot cards contain which contests (card-style data, CSD) to ensure that each contest receives adequate scrutiny, without examining more cards than necessary. RLAs using CSD in…
We present a method and software for ballot-polling risk-limiting audits (RLAs) based on Bernoulli sampling: ballots are included in the sample with probability $p$, independently. Bernoulli sampling has several advantages: (1) it does not…
Card-level comparison risk-limiting audits (CLCAs) heretofore required a CVR for each cast card and a "link" identifying which CVR is for which card -- which many voting systems cannot provide. Every set of CVRs that produces the same…
Randomized linear algebra (RLA) algorithms are a modern class of numerical linear algebra techniques that play an essential role in scientific computing and machine learning, with broad and growing adoption. However, their discovery remains…
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…
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…
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…
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…
SOBA is an approach to election verification that provides observers with justifiably high confidence that the reported results of an election are consistent with an audit trail ("ballots"), which can be paper or electronic. SOBA combines…
For more than a century, election officials across the United States have inspected voting machines before elections using a procedure called Logic and Accuracy Testing (LAT). This procedure consists of election officials casting a test…
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…
Studying distributed computing through the lens of algebraic topology has been the source of many significant breakthroughs during the last two decades, especially in the design of lower bounds or impossibility results for deterministic…
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…
In many real world elections, agents are not required to rank all candidates. We study three of the most common methods used to modify voting rules to deal with such partial votes. These methods modify scoring rules (like the Borda count),…
The process of drawing electoral district boundaries is known as political redistricting. Within this context, gerrymandering is the practice of drawing these boundaries such that they unfairly favor a particular political party, often…
The single transferable vote (STV) is a system of preferential proportional voting employed in multi-seat elections. Each ballot cast by a voter is a (potentially partial) ranking over a set of candidates. The margin of victory, or simply…
Accurately predicting road networks from satellite images requires a global understanding of the network topology. We propose to capture such high-level information by introducing a graph-based framework that simulates the addition of…
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…