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[ItsMyVoteDammit]

The party in power in the area (money talks) controls the vote if Diebold is involved. The party in power in this recall tried to delay the vote through the unions because they wanted to get more Diebold machines into the state.

So what do you think the outcome of this recall will be with 60% of the vote being counted by Diebold?

[DoctorZIn]

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[supercat]

Hand-recounts of ballots are stupid, but a good system should be set up to allow hand audits: (1) sometime when or before each ballot is first counted, it should be marked with a machine-readable unique identifier; (2) all ballots should be stored electronically including the unique ID, and electronic copies of all ballots made available to interested parties for auditing; it should be straightforward for any interested party to confirm the accuracy of the counts derived from the electronic copies; (3) a few hundred ballots should be selected at random (using some reasonably-truly-random process such as rolling dice), and the electronic copies compared with the physical ballots.

In a properly-designed system, there should be less than one undetected read error per million ballots (there may be some ballots which the system flags as unreadable; those should be handled by hand). Thus, if 100 ballots are selected at random, all 100 should match perfectly.

If discrepancies are noted between any of the physical ballots and the electronic copies, then all the paper ballots should be rescanned and compared against the original scan. All ballots which don't match should be checked to determine the cause of the mismatch. Once any problems are repaired, a sample of 200 ballots should be taken; all 200 should match perfectly. If not, continue problem analysis.

If the margin on a race is less than 3%, then using a sample of more than 100 ballots would probably be a good idea. But the odds of a 3% error rate (whether intentional or not) being undetected in a 100-ballot sample are less than 5%.

To my mind, designing a system to allow hand auditing would be much more practical than allowing only machine recounts using machines which may be just as defective or rigged as those on the original count.