To: Joe NYC who wrote (128915 ) 11/21/2000 7:41:13 PM From: Petz Respond to Jozef, I think its clear that the Florida law only allows manual recounts for the cases where there has been some kind of machine failure. As I recall, manual recount was only one of three possible options to choose. Apparently the actual legislator who wrote the law stated that manual recounts were only to be used when there was machine or software failure. In those cases, a countywide manual recount would not be required, just the precincts that had a problem, so the deadline would be reasonable.less accurate than machines, he opposes them in every county, Republican and Democratic, even though it would be advantageous for him to do a recount in Republican counties. His position on manual inaccuracy is based on the fact that a random sample by machine (about 99.8%) is actually more accurate than a human-error- and human-bias-prone recount by hand. Machines are not biased against republicans or democrats, he believes that the outcome of the election can be more accurately determined by a 99.8% randomly chosen sample of all the voters than it can be determined by 5000 partisan observers. In the former case, the margin for error is about +- 150 votes. In the latter case, having just 2 out of 100 dishonest workers could change the election by 1000's of votes.
