Graph-Based Audits for Meek Single Transferable Vote Elections

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Author: Heitzmann, Edouard
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Heitzmann, Edouard
author_facet Heitzmann, Edouard
contents In the context of election security, a Risk-Limiting Audit (RLA) is a statistical framework that uses a minimal partial recount of the ballots to guarantee that the results of the election were correctly reported. A generalized RLA framework has remained elusive for algorithmic election rules such as the Single Transferable Vote (STV) rule, because of the dependence of these rules on the chronology of eliminations and elections leading to the outcome of the election. This paper proposes a new graph-based approach to audit these algorithmic election rules, by considering the space of all possible sequences of elections and eliminations. If we fix a subgraph of this universal space ahead of the audit, a sufficient strategy is to verify statistically that the true election sequence does not leave the fixed subgraph. This makes for a flexible framework to audit these elections in a chronology-agnostic way.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2602_04527
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Graph-Based Audits for Meek Single Transferable Vote Elections
Heitzmann, Edouard
Computer Science and Game Theory
Applications
In the context of election security, a Risk-Limiting Audit (RLA) is a statistical framework that uses a minimal partial recount of the ballots to guarantee that the results of the election were correctly reported. A generalized RLA framework has remained elusive for algorithmic election rules such as the Single Transferable Vote (STV) rule, because of the dependence of these rules on the chronology of eliminations and elections leading to the outcome of the election. This paper proposes a new graph-based approach to audit these algorithmic election rules, by considering the space of all possible sequences of elections and eliminations. If we fix a subgraph of this universal space ahead of the audit, a sufficient strategy is to verify statistically that the true election sequence does not leave the fixed subgraph. This makes for a flexible framework to audit these elections in a chronology-agnostic way.
title Graph-Based Audits for Meek Single Transferable Vote Elections
topic Computer Science and Game Theory
Applications
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.04527