Assertion-Based Approaches to Auditing Complex Elections, with Application to Party-List Proportional Elections

Abstract

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 recount—at the cost of some controlled probability of error. A recently developed approach for conducting RLAs, SHANGRLA, provides a flexible framework that can encompass a wide variety of social choice functions and audit strategies. Its flexibility comes from reducing sufficient conditions for outcomes to be correct to canonical ‘assertions’ that have a simple mathematical form. Assertions have been developed for auditing various social choice functions inclu..