Auditing Hamiltonian Elections

TL;DR

This paper develops risk-limiting audit methods for Hamiltonian delegate allocation in US presidential primaries, demonstrating effective, low-cost auditing techniques for real-world elections using variants like plurality and instant runoff voting.

Contribution

It introduces novel risk-limiting audit procedures tailored for Hamiltonian delegate allocation methods in primaries, addressing a gap in election auditing techniques.

Findings

Audits achieve high confidence with small risk limits.

Auditing is feasible at low cost in real-world elections.

Methods work with different candidate viability criteria.

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.