Auditing Hamiltonian Elections
This addresses election integrity for primaries using proportional delegate allocation, but is incremental as it applies existing auditing techniques to specific voting methods.
The paper tackles the problem of verifying delegate allocation in US presidential primaries using Hamilton method variants, showing that risk-limiting audits can achieve high confidence (small risk limits) at low cost in real-world elections.
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.