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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Alan Smithee who wrote (90473)	12/13/2004 9:22:41 PM
From: KLP	Respond to of 793770

From SoundPolitics a while ago...Are Vote Counting Errors Random? December 13, 2004 This is not a post I enjoy writing, but I think I should prepare my fellow Republicans for some possible bad news. Let me begin by saying that the answer to my question is no. People tend to make mistakes that favor themselves or their team. For example, I have found that when I balance my checkbook I make mistakes in my favor about twice as often as I make mistakes in the bank's favor. Grocery store checkers tend to err in favor of their customers, because that's easier psychologically. I know that when I watch for a checker's mistakes, I find myself telling them the total is too low far more often than I find myself telling them it is too high. The same pattern is found in vote counting. Counters tend to err in favor of their own party. Please understand that I am saying that people do this even if they do not intend to consciously. (I recall seeing, years ago, a study that found that counters tended to err in favor of their own parties. As I recall, and it has been many years, the study was done in Wisconsin, a place that has relatively clean elections.) We should expect errors to be more frequent when vote counters have to count very large numbers of ballots. I would find it fairly easy to keep my full attention on the ballots for an hour or so, but I am not positive I could do so for an entire day — no matter how hard I tried. Others will be better than I at paying attention to a boring task, but at least a few will be worse. In King county one-third of the vote counters are Democrats, one-third are Republicans, and one-third are county employees. We can be certain that most of the county employees are Democrats, so most of the vote counting teams will have 2 Democrats and 1 Republican. King county has many ballots and mostly Democrat dominated vote counting teams, so I expect that the vote counting errors in King county will not be random, but will favor the Democrats. The King county errors might be counter-balanced by Republican favoring errors in other counties. To reach a conclusion on that, you would have to analyze the rest of the counties individually. I do think that the smaller counties (nearly all Republican) will be less likely to have errors, simply because their vote counters will not be working such long hours. (Cross posted at Jim Miller on Politics.) Posted by Jim Miller at 04:25 PM \| Comments (7) Categories: