elec-package {elec}R Documentation

Statistical Election Audits Package

Description

This is a bizzare collection of functions written to do various sorts of statistical election audits. There are also functions to generate simulated voting data, and simulated ``truth'' so as to do simulations to check charactaristics of these methods. The package includes two data sets consisting of actual reported voting results and, in one case, audit data for races held November, 2008, in California.

Details

Package: elec
Type: Package
Version: 0.1
Date: 2009-01-14
License: GPL (>= 2)
LazyLoad: yes

This package is a bit of a mess. Start with the elec.data data object which holds votes, counts, margins, etc. The simplest functions are the CAST functions, such as CAST.calc.sample, which implement Philip B. Stark's CAST method of election auditing. Another collection of functions, primarily tri.calc.sample and trinomial.bound, implement the trinomial bound audit method designed by Luke W. Miratrix and Philip B. Stark.

The examples primarily use a data set included in the package, santa.cruz and santa.cruz.audit, which holds the ballot counts for a Santa Cruz, CA race that we audited using these methods. See trinomial.bound for how these data were analyzed. The yolo data set holds precinct level counts for a race in Yolo county.

The package grew out of an earlier, messier (can you believe it?) package that implemented general routines for election auditing. Pieces of this package are used by the aforementioned cleaner methods, but all the individual functions are still there for specific uses, such as making different tests. Start with stark.test, which has an index of the pieces in its ``see also'' section.

Author(s)

Luke W. Miratrix

Maintainer: Luke W. Miratrix <luke@vzvz.org>

References

For general papers on election auditing see the list at http://www.stat.berkeley.edu/~stark/Vote/index.htm. For the trinomial bound, see Luke W. Miratrix and Philip B. Stark. (2009) Election Audits using a Trinomial Bound (in press). For an overview of the races and the methods, see Joseph Lorenzo Hall1, Philip B. Stark, Luke W. Miratrix, Elaine Ginnold, Freddie Oakley, Tom Stanionis, and Gail Pellerin. (2009) Implementing Risk-Limiting Audits in California (in press).


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