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

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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)

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.

Suggested Citation

  • Sarwate Anand D. & Checkoway Stephen & Shacham Hovav, 2013. "Risk-limiting Audits and the Margin of Victory in Nonplurality Elections," Statistics, Politics and Policy, De Gruyter, vol. 4(1), pages 29-64, January.
    • Handle: RePEc:bpj:statpp:v:4:y:2013:i:1:p:29-64:n:5
    DOI: 10.1515/spp-2012-0003
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    References listed on IDEAS

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    1. Etienne Farvaque & Hubert Jayet & Lionel Ragot, 2009. "A "winner" under any voting rule? An experiment on the single transferable vote," Université Paris1 Panthéon-Sorbonne (Post-Print and Working Papers) halshs-00429725, HAL.
    2. Saari,Donald G., 2001. "Decisions and Elections," Cambridge Books, Cambridge University Press, number 9780521004046.
    3. Steven J. Brams & Peter C. Fishburn, 2010. "Going from Theory to Practice: The Mixed Success of Approval Voting," Studies in Choice and Welfare, in: Jean-François Laslier & M. Remzi Sanver (ed.), Handbook on Approval Voting, chapter 0, pages 19-37, Springer.
    4. Saari,Donald G., 2001. "Decisions and Elections," Cambridge Books, Cambridge University Press, number 9780521808163.
    5. Nicolaus Tideman, 1995. "The Single Transferable Vote," Journal of Economic Perspectives, American Economic Association, vol. 9(1), pages 27-38, Winter.
    6. Gibbard, Allan, 1973. "Manipulation of Voting Schemes: A General Result," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 41(4), pages 587-601, July.
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    Cited by:

    1. Michelle Blom & Peter J. Stuckey & Vanessa J. Teague, 2019. "Toward Computing the Margin of Victory in Single Transferable Vote Elections," INFORMS Journal on Computing, INFORMS, vol. 31(4), pages 636-653, October.
    2. Niclas Boehmer & Robert Bredereck & Piotr Faliszewski & Rolf Niedermeier, 2022. "A Quantitative and Qualitative Analysis of the Robustness of (Real-World) Election Winners," Papers 2208.13760, arXiv.org.

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