STV Audit Graphs: A Visual Tool to Measure Election Stability
TL;DR
Audit graphs are presented as a solution to design the assertions needed for RLAs of arbitrary STV elections, as well as quantitatively describe the uncertainty (or lack thereof) of their outcomes.
Abstract
The Single Transferable Vote (STV) is an algorithmic election rule. Round by round, a profile of ranked-choice ballots is reinterpreted to determine which decision to make next, and candidates are seated or eliminated until a full winner set emerges. This algorithmic nature makes STV theoretically more brittle than other election rules: uncertainty about an early round of the election might percolate irreversibly into the rest. For this reason, a generalized non-trivial Risk-Limiting Audit (RLA) framework has remained elusive for STV. Such a framework must concoct a set of null hypotheses, or assertions, whose rejection would bound the probability that the outcome of the election was incorrectly reported. We present audit graphs as a solution to design the assertions needed for RLAs of arbitrary STV elections, as well as quantitatively describe the uncertainty (or lack thereof) of their outcomes. These audit graphs explore election paths that are ``close''to the recorded one by considering the alternative decisions the STV algorithm might have made if a small number of ballots were perturbed.