re: #41 lostlakehiker

You’re way wrong about the expected error margin. In an election of 1400000 votes, assuming all voters tossed a coin, the standard deviation will be about 530. So it’s nothing particularly out of the ordinary if the actual margin is 400.

Once the election has been held and the votes have been counted, there’s very, very little room for LEGITIMATE changes due to recounting.

It can happen that a few of the absentee ballots were marked ambiguously, and in an impartial review, as with going to the tape after a questionable call on the field, the original intent of the voter can be discerned to have been different from what was originally recorded. Or it can happen that the original intent of the voter is indecipherable. Not 1 percent of the votes come from a recount-able pool, and of those, not 1 percent are truly ambiguous. That means that in an honest recount, we should expect the tally to change by maybe 50, tops. More likely, it’ll change by 5 or 10 or 20 or something like that.

To get a change of 400 votes requires foul play.

Or, you know, a faulty ballot counting machine or a crappy pen for marking ballots or confusion about exactly how to fill things out….