Risk-Limiting Audits for Parliamentary Majorities
Abstract
Existing methods for risk-limiting audits typically focus on certifying individual contests. In parliamentary elections, however, the politically relevant outcome is often whether a party has won enough seats to form government, not whether every reported seat outcome is correct. Extending on the work of Mohanty et al. (2019), we formulate the certification of a parliamentary majority as a partial conjunction testing problem: it is enough to verify that the reported winning party truly won at least a majority of its reported seats. Building on the SHANGRLA auditing framework, we construct a sequential audit statistic for the majority outcome by combining seat-level statistics. We then propose adaptive sampling strategies that allocate auditing effort across seats, including variants that learn to avoid spending excessive effort on seats that appear unlikely to have been truly won. Using simulations based on synthetic and real data, from the 2014 Indian Lok Sabha election, we show that auditing the parliamentary majority can substantially reduce the number of ballots inspected (by almost a thousand-fold) compared to certifying every reported winning seat.
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BibTeX
@misc{freestone2026risklimiting,
title = {{Risk-Limiting Audits for Parliamentary Majorities}},
author = {Jack Freestone and Dennis Leung and Damjan Vukcevic},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = jul,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2607.21082},
eprint = {2607.21082},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.21082},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Risk-Limiting Audits for Parliamentary Majorities
AU - Jack Freestone
AU - Dennis Leung
AU - Damjan Vukcevic
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/07/23
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2607.21082
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.21082
AB - Existing methods for risk-limiting audits typically focus on certifying individual contests. In parliamentary elections, however, the politically relevant outcome is often whether a party has won enough seats to form government, not whether every reported seat outcome is correct. Extending on the work of Mohanty et al. (2019), we formulate the certification of a parliamentary majority as a partial conjunction testing problem: it is enough to verify that the reported winning party truly won at least a majority of its reported seats. Building on the SHANGRLA auditing framework, we construct a sequential audit statistic for the majority outcome by combining seat-level statistics. We then propose adaptive sampling strategies that allocate auditing effort across seats, including variants that learn to avoid spending excessive effort on seats that appear unlikely to have been truly won. Using simulations based on synthetic and real data, from the 2014 Indian Lok Sabha election, we show that auditing the parliamentary majority can substantially reduce the number of ballots inspected (by almost a thousand-fold) compared to certifying every reported winning seat.
ER -