发表机构
University of Colorado in Boulder（科罗拉多大学博尔德分校）
机构由 AI 辅助整理，请以论文原文为准。AI 中文总结
针对STV选举规则脆弱性，提出审计图工具，通过探索邻近选举路径设计RLA断言，量化结果不确定性，衡量选举稳定性。
AI 中文摘要
单一可转移投票（STV）是一种算法化的选举规则。逐轮地，对排名选择选票的概况进行重新解释，以确定下一步应做出的决策，候选人被选出或淘汰，直到产生完整的获胜者集合。这种算法特性使得STV在理论上比其他选举规则更为脆弱：关于选举早期轮次的不确定性可能会不可逆地渗透到其余过程中。因此，对于STV而言，一个通用的非平凡风险限制审计（RLA）框架一直难以实现。这样的框架必须构造一组零假设或断言，其拒绝将限制选举结果被错误报告的概率。我们提出审计图作为设计任意STV选举的RLA所需断言的一种解决方案，并定量描述其结果的不确定性（或缺乏不确定性）。这些审计图通过考虑如果少量选票被扰动时STV算法可能做出的替代决策，来探索与记录路径“接近”的选举路径。
英文摘要
The Single Transferable Vote (STV) is an algorithmic election rule. Round by round, a profile of ranked-choice ballots is reinterpreted to determine which decision to make next, and candidates are seated or eliminated until a full winner set emerges. This algorithmic nature makes STV theoretically more brittle than other election rules: uncertainty about an early round of the election might percolate irreversibly into the rest. For this reason, a generalized non-trivial Risk-Limiting Audit (RLA) framework has remained elusive for STV. Such a framework must concoct a set of null hypotheses, or assertions, whose rejection would bound the probability that the outcome of the election was incorrectly reported. We present audit graphs as a solution to design the assertions needed for RLAs of arbitrary STV elections, as well as quantitatively describe the uncertainty (or lack thereof) of their outcomes. These audit graphs explore election paths that are ``close'' to the recorded one by considering the alternative decisions the STV algorithm might have made if a small number of ballots were perturbed.
