Risk-limiting Audits and the Margin of Victory in Nonplurality Elections

Sarwate Anand D. (), Checkoway Stephen and Shacham Hovav
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Sarwate Anand D.: Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago, 6045 S. Kenwood Ave, Chicago, IL 60637, USA
Checkoway Stephen: Department of Computer Science, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, USA
Shacham Hovav: Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, CA, USA

Statistics, Politics and Policy, 2013, vol. 4, issue 1, 29-64

Abstract: Post-election audits are an important method for verifying the outcome of an election. Recent work on risk-limiting, post-election audits has focused almost exclusively on plurality elections. Several organization and municipalities use nonplurality methods such as range voting, the Borda count, and instant-runoff voting (IRV). We believe that it is crucial to develop effective methods of performing risk-limiting, post-election audits for these methods. We define a general notion of the margin of victory and develop risk-limiting auditing procedures for these nonplurality methods. For scored systems, we show how to adapt methods from plurality auditing. For IRV, the situation is markedly different. We provide a risk-limiting method for auditing the candidate elimination order. We provide a more efficient audit for the elections in which the margin of the IRV election can be efficiently calculated or bounded. We provide efficiently computable upper and lower bounds on the margin and, where possible, compare them to the exact margins for a large number of real elections.

Date: 2013
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DOI: 10.1515/spp-2012-0003

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