Paper trails

Avedon is still guest-blogging on Eschaton, which is a good thing. She deserves the audience.

One of her posts today repeats a point she's made before, which is important and worthwhile and unfortunately not quite correct:

And that's where the real problem lies, because a paper trail is meaningless if no one ever looks at it. The initial count of optical-scan ballots is done by machine, and if you fiddle the machine count - which you obviously can - so that no race is close enough to require a recount, no one will ever know. There is ample evidence that exactly this may have happened in 2004. Note that the graph I reproduced here shows that, while hand-counts produced discrepancies with exit poll results of well under a percentage point, optical scanners gave us around 5% - better than for other machine-dependent methods, but still not so good, and definitely enough to throw an election. Certainly it's all you need to cast a victory as being by a wide enough margin that no one asks for a recount.

See, if all those ballots from optical-scan machines were actually reviewed, we might find that there was no difference between the exit polls and the actual votes - that is, that the machines had been tweaked to give a false result.

But since no one ever demanded a hand-count of those ballots, it's unlikely that we'll ever know.

She's absolutely right that a paper trail is useless if it is never examined, and that relying completely on machine counts to determine if an recount is triggered is insufficient. This is a point that needs to be made again and again.

But she's wrong that the only way to guarantee a non-cooked count is hand-counting. Starting in 2000, I've seen many people suggest that all election systems be auditable and that audits be conducted at random as well as when the election is close. Hand recounts of 5% of all precincts should provide more than enough opportunities to spot cooked results, as long as the recounts are conducted randomly. In fact, I'd go so far as to suggest that in any election, any candidate on the ballot can request recounts of up to 5% of the precincts for no reason whatsoever, at no cost to the candidate. More recounts can be requested at no cost in cases where the election is close (say, the winning candidate receives less than 2% more of the vote than the next-place finisher) or when any credible evidence of miscounting can be presented, even if that evidence is purely statistical. This would be cheaper and faster than total hand recounting but would, I think, be an adequate guard against election theft by ballot miscount.

NYC Fandom on the air

On the principle that whatever fans do with passion is fannish, anyway.

Last Friday, Moshe Feder (sandial) called in to WNYC's The Brian Lehrer Show to discuss the major development projects currently on the table for Manhattan. They let him talk for several minutes and much interesting was said. The archives are available online; Moshe starts at around minute 25. (Warning: Real Audio.)

The Great Red Nemesis and the Woman Clothed in the Best-Seller

sarah_ovenall finishes the Left Below books and sums up their theological message:

Neener, neener.

I might add:

Jesus wept.

I will also add that somewhere very early in my life I deeply internalized that the certainty that one is among the saved is the purest expression of pride and as such a sure sign that one is forsaken. So deeply is this ingrained that I have an almost sub-neural reaction to the hubris of the evangelicals and I can't help but think that there really is a hell, and they're the only people going to it.