Abstract
Presidential primaries are a critical part of the United States Presidential electoral process, since they are used to select the candidates in the Presidential election. While methods differ by state and party, many primaries involve proportional delegate allocation using the so-called Hamilton method. In this paper we show how to conduct risk-limiting audits for delegate allocation elections using variants of the Hamilton method where the viability of candidates is determined either by a plurality vote or using instant runoff voting. Experiments on real-world elections show that we can audit primary elections to high confidence (small risk limits) usually at low cost.
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Notes
- 1.
Virginia’s audit does not take place until after the outcome is certified, so it cannot limit the risk that an incorrect reported outcome will become final: technically, it is not a RLA.
- 2.
We do not distinguish between ballots and ballot cards; in general, ballots consist of one or more cards, of which at most one contains any given contest.
- 3.
There are more complicated alternate rules for the case where no candidate reaches \(\tau \); we do not consider this case here.
- 4.
For sequentially valid test statistics, the sample can be augmented at will; for other methods, there may be an escalation schedule prescribing a sequence of sample sizes before conducting a full manual tabulation.
- 5.
In other words, the hypothesis that the assertion is false has been rejected at a sufficiently small significance level.
- 6.
One might instead seek to minimize a quantile of the sample size or some other function of the distribution of sample size, for instance, to account for fixed costs for retrieving and opening a batch of ballots and per-ballot and per-contest costs.
- 7.
The procedure used to calculate the ASN for an assertion with margin m is available in the public repositories https://github.com/michelleblom/primaries and https://github.com/pbstark/SHANGRLA.
- 8.
Party Leaders and Elected Officials.
- 9.
Data for plurality-based primaries was obtained from www.thegreenpapers.com/P20. Data for IRV-based primaries we consider was provided by the relevant state-level Democrats.
- 10.
A small number of DNC 2020 primaries that did not use proportional allocation of delegates were not considered, in addition to those for which we could not obtain data.
References
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Blom, M., Stark, P.B., Stuckey, P.J., Teague, V., Vukcevic, D. (2021). Auditing Hamiltonian Elections. In: Bernhard, M., et al. Financial Cryptography and Data Security. FC 2021 International Workshops. FC 2021. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12676. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-63958-0_21
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