Multidisciplinary Conference on Election Auditing: Cambridge, Massachusetts - December 2018

Massachusetts Institute Of Technology, Cambridge MA

Investigators

Abstract

This full-day public conference explores the intersections of scientific, policy, and legal issues related to post-election auditing. Advances in statistical auditing techniques show promise in providing assurance that votes were counted as cast, and that results of elections have been correctly declared. Standard auditing practices provide models for election officials to assure that the business practices associated with running elections have been conducted according to law and regulation. However, gaps remain in techniques needed to assure that certain election-specific processes have been properly conducted; assigning residences to the correct voting districts is one of these. The purpose of this conference is to explore the range of existing election auditing procedures, assess where new scholarship could expand the range of auditing techniques, and discover the legal, administrative, and social roadblocks that exist in the widespread adoption of innovative auditing practices in the area of elections. This conference will provide a forum for disparate professionals -engineers, mathematicians, social scientists, legal scholars, and election officials- to explore these issues together. A conference proceeding will be published, to ensure the widest dissemination of the scholarship discussed at the conference. This full-day public conference explores the intersections of scientific, policy, and legal issues related to post-election auditing. The adoption of new auditing techniques, such as risk-limiting audits, has reached a critical juncture, as states have come to adopt new techniques and as scholars in the field recognize new challenges. Among those challenges are how to adopt rigorous auditing techniques based on rigorous statistical principles to the practical settings of American elections, and how to extend statistical auditing techniques into the variety of proportional representation schemes that states and localities have recently adopted. In addition, recent controversies have revealed the value of developing rigorous auditing techniques in areas other than vote-counting, such as the assignments of residences to voting districts, where traditional ways of defining districts (e.g., through "metes and bounds") interface uneasily with the explosion of GIS capabilities. The conference will provide the opportunity for scientific and engineering scholars in the field to interact with election practitioners, which should provide a major boost in setting the research agenda among scholars working to develop innovative, yet practical, election auditing techniques. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.