Green Party Calls For Recount, Wants To Push For Open-Source Voting Machines (nbcnewyork.com)

The Green party candidate in the U.S. presidential election, Jill Stein, has raised over $5 million in donations to fund a recount in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, which are the states key to Hillary Clinton's loss on November 8th. She is seeking a recount in these three states after computer scientists discovered Clinton averaged 7% worse in counties with e-voting machines vs. counties with only paper or optical scan ballots. An anonymous Slashdot reader writes: On November 23, the Stein/Baraka Green Party Campaign launched an effort to ensure the integrity of our elections," calling for "publicly-owned, open source voting equipment." In approximately 48 hours (as of 1:20pm EST (GMT-5) on Nov-25-2016) $5,026,516.15 has been raised to pay for a recount in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, and [they are] currently collecting towards a recount in Michigan. The Green party also states: "The Green Party Platform calls for 'publicly-owned, open source voting equipment and deploy it across the nation to ensure high national standards, performance, transparency and accountability; use verifiable paper ballots; and institute mandatory automatic random precinct recounts to ensure a high level of accuracy in election results.'" More details can be read on MSNBC news. The Washington Post asks: Why are people giving Jill Stein millions of dollars for an election recount? UPDATE 11/25/16: Washington Examiner is reporting that Green Party officials have filed for a presidential vote recount in Wisconsin.
UPDATE 11/26/16: Hillary Clinton's campaign said Saturday that it will take part in the recount in Wisconsin.

Comments

Re:Lets call Bullshit

[Solandri]

As for them not asking for recounts in the states Clinton won, it costs millions of dollars to do a recount, you can hardly expect them to raise millions of dollars for an action that could only help their opponent.

It's statistically invalid to sample (count votes with some margin of error) all the states, then resample only a few states whose results were close to but not in the direction you were hoping for. In science, that's called data fraud. You're deliberately casting your selection bias onto the outcome. Same reason why it was invalid to recount only Miami-Dade county in the 2000 election. It's like rolling a 3d6 to generate your character's stats, then only re-rolling the lowest value die. That selection bias will skew the average higher, deviating from the true mean value the dice produce.

You want a fair recount, you have to recount everything. The premise is that something was wrong with the original counting methodology. Therefore you've corrected it, and need to apply that correction to all precincts/counties/states, not just the ones where the correct count would improve the results you want.