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votingworks / arlo

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Parse and configure Number of Winners properly from Dominion CVR file #937

Open nealmcb opened 3 years ago

nealmcb commented 3 years ago

Based on the audit report and the p-value calculations, it looks like the number of winners is not parsed correctly from a Dominion CVR file, for a contest with e.g. VOTE For=3, which also generally means 3 winners in US block-plurality contests (unlike Approval voting). All contests have 1 winner listed even when Votes Allowed is properly parsed and greater than 1.

mcchilders commented 3 years ago

That's not quite right; it's not an error, rather we don't support multi-winner ballot comparison yet. This was a deliberate decision - while it's true that "Vote For=N" often means that contest is also an "N Number of Winners" contest, that isn't always true. Because of this, we don't want to just assume the values are the same (especially in a way that is opaque to the audit admin) because it could cause an audit to look correctly configured but be incorrect because of those assumptions. Instead we're going to include a way for the audit admin to adjust this value (if necessary) before we support multi-winner.

nealmcb commented 3 years ago

Ahh - good to know! Thanks.