Or an international monitoring team, headed by President Carter.
I often wonder what the US government would say if we were looking at a similar situation in a s******* country…
Soooo…you think this “margin of error” is consistent across counties and through time? You think there are NEVER any errors, deliberate or otherwise by biased election officials in the original ballot counts? And you think as long as the results are within the “margin of error,” we should shrug off the actual results and any possible malfeasance and declare a winner?
And you’re arguing that because something has never happened in the past, it can’t happen in the present?
Interesting.
I’m arguing that the purpose of an election is to determine the will of the voters. If an election is this close, that cannot be done. Things happen, like 20,000 voters failing to find the Senate race on their ballots, or weather keeping people from the polls, or lack of machines. None of this is enough to flip a race that’s decisive, but in close races it makes the result suspect. Let’s end these suspect results and just declare a tie, and then have tiebreaker rules, which could mean runoffs, incumbent party always loses, each candidate serves half the term, or even a coin flip. But stop doing these damn recounts because they always end in hard feelings and mistrust. Either the first result is the result, or declare ties in close races.
There is zero evidence that the recount will produce a more accurate result than the first count did. It certainly can’t make up for the other errors in the system, such as 20K voters not voting in the Senate race in Broward.
It is safe to say, at least in the Senate race, that it is impossible to determine the will of the people. CAn we all agree on that? And if so, what’s the best way to handle that problem?
Shouldn’t there be a corresponding increase in workers and machines? That would be like saying we only have 10 teachers per school whether the school has 100 kids or 2,500 kids.
Broward hasn’t even started their recount, BTW. At least Palm Beach has given us information. Broward doesn’t say anything at all without a court order.
Who’s in charge of this stuff again?
Is it just me or are Republicans almost always in the lead in recount elections? When’s the last time the roles were flipped and a Democrat led by 0.1% or something?
AFAIK, it is the counties. I really don’t know. This wasn’t a gotcha question.
Then why not just count all the damn votes already?
And zero that it won’t. That’s why you do it.
Of course not. That’s what counting *all *the ballots is for.
Maybe you’ve been asleep, but this isn’t 2000 and your partisan arguments against the most basic process of democracy were already dissected then when made by others.
Florida did away with the chads, and after some fits and starts with touchscreens and others eventually settled on scan ballots.
Well, yeah – but for the benefit of those unfamiliar: what you have is on election night, there’s one or more scanners at each polling place (depending on population) and at the end of the day you write down the readout of the scanner, then the largely volunteer poll workers make a crosscheck of how many ballots are in the basket vs. how many the scanner counted and make a note of it on the report then zap it to the Elections Board. Any discrepancies are looked at in the general canvass. When it comes down to recount now the process is more closely monitored so it gets done in one central location, with one fixed number of machines and a smaller number of people so you can control it all more tightly.
Now, if a particular county does not have this part of the operation be large enough to do a general recount in the time required, someone lacked foresight. But the question becomes, who’s responsible for PB or Broward being sufficiently equipped and staffed in case of recount? The counties themselves, or the State? That is one expensive contingency, and again, most poll workers were volunteers it’s not like you can summon them all again.
As to the ballot-design issue, that seems to be a major problem that keeps biting Florida in the fundament, but I’ve seen other states’ ballots that are equally unimpressive. The one complaint about one of the races being tucked under a Wall Of Text in the lower left could be fixed by a hard and fast rule that NOTHING goes in the instructions column other than instructions (hell, make it a different font/shaded background), and all actual votes are in columns B thru D with separating “gutters” so that it is obvious where are the elections.
Why would a fixed number of machines help control the recount more tightly? Double the number of machines currently doing the recount in Palm Beach County, and you still only have sixteen machines, still few enough to maintain control of the recount, especially with the number of attorneys and party leaders keeping a keen eye on the proceedings.
Tell it to the elections commissioners who fixed it at 8, and ask whose call was it – county or state.
It’s the county. This NYT article says the Miami-Dade elections office rented 4 additional machines, bringing its total to 10. This also means the number of machines isn’t fixed but fluid.
Another puzzler is that
Mail-in ballots must be requested no later than 6 days before the election, so officials certainly had time to prepare. And ballots from overseas are still coming in. The deadline for arrival is this Friday.
Huh. I just had a look at my ballot info (I live overseas, and vote out of Marion County, FL), and it tells me my ballot was tabulated. They received it on October 5 - wonder when they counted it?
Can you confirm for us that they were able to do the initial machine count in a matter of hours?
No, this is the machine recount. If, after the machine recount is completed, the margin in a race is < 0.25%, then there’s a hand recount.
Each county’s ballot is different. You’d have to reprogram the additional machines, and test to make sure the reprogramming was done correctly. By the time they finished that, they’d be past the deadline anyway.
The notion that it’s more important to finish the recount by a particular date, than it is to complete the recount and do it correctly, is of course absurd. It also flies in the face of the right of the voters to have their votes counted, and counted correctly. I suspect that the Dem legal team will be making that latter point in court.
Complete withButterfly ballot 2.0
Recounts are ridiculous. If you take the same pile of ballots and count them twice, you should get exactly the same numbers. If you don’t something is broken somewhere in the system. It’s so bizarre to me that a recount can cause triple-digit change in vote totals, and everyone just shrugs off the fact that apparently hundreds of people disenfranchised on the first go. Or the second go.
It’s not really disenfranchisement if they have a mechanism to force a recount if there’s any chance that it’s actually close. It’s just a lower precision measure, followed by increased precision measures that take longer if the situation is close.
That said, I do agree that they should be able to do a better job than this with the first count. Especially in a place that has repeatedly had problems. Give them them the latest and greatest tech.