The Decisive Power of Indecision: Low-Variance Risk-Limiting Audits and Election Contestation via Marginal Mark Recording

Risk-limiting audits (RLAs) are the established techniques for verifying 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 define new families of audits that help to address these issues. 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 …

absolute adoption audits correctness cs.cr efficiency election elections fact families large low mark offer power recording risk techniques