Checking election outcome accuracy Post-election audit sampling

摘要

This article * provides an overview of post-election audit sampling research and comparesvarious approaches to calculating post-election audit sample sizes, focusing onrisklimiting audits, * discusses fundamental concepts common to all risk-limiting post-electionaudits, presenting new margin error bounds, sampling weights and samplingprobabilities that improve upon existing approaches and work for any size auditunit and for single or multi-winner election contests, * provides two new simple formulas for estimating post-election audit samplesizes in cases when detailed data, expertise, or tools are not available, * summarizes four improved methods for calculating risk-limiting electionaudit sample sizes, showing how to apply precise margin error bounds to improvethe accuracy and efficacy of existing methods, and * discusses sampling mistakes that reduce post-election audit effectiveness.