Risk-Limiting Audits for Parliamentary Majorities

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2607.21082v1
• Date: Thu, 23 Jul 2026 09:12:07 GMT
• Title: Risk-Limiting Audits for Parliamentary Majorities
• Abstract summary: In parliamentary elections, the politically relevant outcome is whether a party has won enough seats to form government, not whether every reported seat outcome is correct.<n>We propose a partial conjunction testing problem where the winning party truly won at least a majority of its reported seats.<n>We show that auditing the parliamentary majority can substantially reduce the number of inspected ballots.
• Score: 0.0
• License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
• 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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