A Sharper discrepancy measure for post-election audits

Understand

Post-election audits use the discrepancy between machine counts and a hand tally of votes in a random sample of precincts to infer whether error affected the electoral outcome.

• The maximum relative overstatement of pairwise margins (MRO) quantifies that discrepancy.
• The electoral outcome a full hand tally shows must agree with the apparent outcome if the MRO is less than 1.
• This condition is sharper than previous ones when there are more than two candidates or when voters may vote for more than one candidate.