Dear Combjelly:
The problem with manual recount of PUNCHED CARD ballots is the rules by which it is done. Out of 400K ballots, a bias of +/- 0.1% yields a switch of 800 votes. Do you think that an observer would catch this error? In those that were contested, it was given to the majority, a democrat and a democratic canvasser over a republican, but clearly to be really fair, that is one that should be thrown out. If all agreed, then no problem. It is much easier to get consensus with optical ballots since the distance between two different candidates is larger than the typical error (on the one I used in Wisconsin, it is about 40:1 from where a machine would not count it for the one it is close to versus the distance to the nearest other candidate). Here, manual recounting can be agreed to by all three (one democrat, one republican, and a poll worker in either camp), and any group of reasonable people would agree as well. This is a problem with voting machines IMHO as the audit trail is more difficult to verify after the fact.
Perhaps all the precincts in the country should upgrade to this system with federal financing (It may even be very popular no matter what happens next in this election) or financed by a campaign tax of 1% on all hard, soft, and issue money (given the high amount spent by all parties this year, it could pay for all the required machines and training needed to do all the precincts in the country in one presidential election year).
Pete |
