Election Audits

This paper presents the first study on the impact of different voting technologies on election outcomes in multi-party elections, analyzing data from a large-scale voting experiment conducted in the 2005 congressional election in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Combining different regression models and matching methods, we estimate the effect of alternative voting technologies on the probability of support for the competing parties in the elections for congress and state legislature.

Considerable controversy swirls around the extent to which Russia’s elections have been falsified. We argue here on the basis of an assessment of aberrant distributions of turnout in official election returns for each or Russia’s national elections beginning in 1995, that falsifications in the form of stuffed ballot boxes and artificially augmented election counts, whose significance was first apparent in its ethnic republics, has now spread to and metastasized within both rural and urban oblast districts.

No abstract available.

We address the problem of auditing an election when precincts may have different sizes, and suggest methods for picking a sample of precincts to audit that takes precinct size into account. one method yields optimal auditing strategies together with an exact measure of its effectiveness (probability of detecting corruption of a given size).

We consider the problem of statistical sampling for auditing elections, and we develop a remarkably simple and easily-calculated upper bound for the sample size necessary for determining with probability at least c whether a given set of n objects contains b or more “bad” objects. While the size of the optimal sample drawn without replacement can be determined with a computer program, our goal is to derive a highly accurate and simple formula that can be used by election officials equipped with only a simple calculator.

The Buenos Aires “VotoElectronico” pilot project took place on October 23, 2005, in the City of Buenos Aires. It involved a pilot test of four different electronic voting systems, in at least 43 voting stations located throughout the City. The purpose of this report is to provide initial qualitative assessments of the pilot project. Quantitative analysis will hopefully be presented at a later date, once detailed data from the pilot project are available for examination.

This paper summarizes what systematic evidence exists about the performance of the American voting process in 2004 and proposes a comprehensive system of performance measures that would allow citizens and officials to assess the quality of the voting system in the U.S.