Related papers: Sublinear Risk-Limiting Audits from Direct Ballot …
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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 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…
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…
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 $A$,…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Test collections are information-retrieval tools that allow researchers to quickly and easily evaluate ranking algorithms. While test collections have become an integral part of IR research, the process of data creation involves significant…
We propose a simple common framework for Risk-Limiting and Bayesian (polling) audits for two-candidate plurality elections. Using it, we derive an expression for the general Bayesian audit; in particular, we do not restrict the prior to a…
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…
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…
Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) integrating explicit reasoning, such as OpenAI's o3-mini, DeepSeek-R1, and QWQ-32B, enable smaller models to solve complex tasks by generating intermediate reasoning steps prior to…