Benjamin Fuller, Rashmi Pai, and Alexander Russell, University of Connecticut - Voting Technology Research Center
Risk-limiting audits (RLAs) are techniques for verifying the outcomes of large elections. While they provide rigorous guarantees of correctness, widespread adoption has been impeded by both efficiency concerns and the fact they offer statistical, rather than absolute, conclusions. We attend to both of these difficulties, defining new families of audits that improve efficiency and offer qualitative advances in statistical power.
Our new audits are enabled by revisiting the standard notion of a cast-vote record so that it can declare multiple possible mark interpretations rather than a single decision; this can reflect the presence of marginal marks, which appear regularly on hand-marked ballots. We show that this simple expedient can offer significant efficiency improvements with only minor changes to existing auditing infrastructure. We consider two ways of representing these marks, both yield risk-limiting comparison audits in the formal sense of Fuller, Harrison, and Russell (IEEE Security & Privacy 2023).
We then define a new type of post-election audit we call a contested audit. These permit each candidate to provide a cast-vote record table advancing their own claim to victory. We prove that these audits offer remarkable sample efficiency, yielding control of risk with a constant number of samples (that is independent of margin). This is a first for an audit with provable soundness. These results are formulated in a game-based security model that specify quantitative soundness and completeness guarantees. These audits provide a means to handle contestation of election results affirmed by conventional RLAs.
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author = {Benjamin Fuller and Rashmi Pai and Alexander Russell},
title = {The Decisive Power of Indecision: {Low-Variance} {Risk-Limiting} Audits and Election Contestation via Marginal Mark Recording},
booktitle = {33rd USENIX Security Symposium (USENIX Security 24)},
year = {2024},
isbn = {978-1-939133-44-1},
address = {Philadelphia, PA},
pages = {5467--5484},
url = {https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity24/presentation/fuller},
publisher = {USENIX Association},
month = aug
}