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No Hand Counting of Electronic Votes
In the Washington state gubernatorial election, the hand recount has begun, and Snohomish County -- which had nearly 100K votes cast on Sequoia electronic voting machines -- won't have to print up and count them all by hand, as had been previously thought by county officials. Instead, they will print up the totals from each of the 937 machines, and compare those to the grand total. (The statewide hand recount is expected to complete before Christmas, modulo court challenges.)
We're down to the wire on having any recounts affect any electoral college votes.
They all meet on December 13th to discuss and submit sealed votes.
That's Monday...
Get off my launchpad!
Um, no. What you are suggesting is a sampling method to find a significant degree of error. Unfortunately all sampling methods have a known margin of error associated with them. When you see results from most political polling you will have about a 4% margin of error and a 95% reliability. Meaning 19 out of 20 times the actual result will be within 4% of whatever they said it was, plus or minus.
/. in the future.
The problem with this particular case is that the margin of victory is absolutely tiny (42 out of about 2.8 million or 0.0015%. Statistically to ensure that you are even 95% certain of a margin of error smaller than that would require counting almost all the votes anyhow.
Should they be comparing to the machine results? I think they should.
Should they be using ballots which have a very low degree of deterioration during recounts(and this is not covered in the Help America Vote Act by the way)? Definately.
Here, however, we are learning that people who voted on electronic voting machines don't even get the democratic benefit of a hand recount. Is this to say that somehow electronic voting machines aren't subject to error? How can that error be quantified if there is no voter verified paper trail? I smell a tasty lawsuit coming which will provide lots of fun for