Why can't they count right?

I couldn’t find anything in the other threads referring to this, so here goes.

Why are they getting different totals on the recount in Florida? Doesn’t this indicate that the whole vote was messed up? Shouldn’t they get the EXACT same count on a recount, regardless if people voted for the wrong candidate?

I don’t like it one bit. Makes me uncomfortable with the rest of the states and the whole voting process in general.

This I could see as a VERY good reason for the Electoral College. You can’t trust the popular vote to be CORRECT to begin with. At least 538 votes aren’t that hard to count.

Actually, I would tend to think that in any state/nation wide election the votes are going to be miscounted to some extent, due to any number of possibilities, such as human error, computer glitches. It’s generally expected, of course, that such a miscount will be insignificant–who cares if your count is off by 100 votes if the election was won by 50,000, or whatever?

Of course, this election is much closer. The latest I’ve heard is that the recount is off the original count by about 700. I don’t know offhand if that’s within the expected range for a miscount, but generally that would be a small enough error to not matter. Obviously not in this case, but I’m still not the least surprised that they’re getting a different count, in fact, I would’ve expected it.

Remember, this is six million votes were’re talking about here, being counted by lots of different people in sixty-someodd counties across a whole state. And, as we’ve seen from the Palm Beach problem, many of these votes are actual little pieces of paper that have to be checked one by one, by hand.

Plenty of people can’t even balance their checkbooks, so it’s pretty easy to see how several hundred people counting to six million would get mixed up a bit in the middle.

Also remember that absentee votes are being counted as they’re mailed in during this whole thing.

There are lots of technical reasons the count can be marginally off. If the ballot requires the voter to color in a little dot or arrow some small percentage of people will be sloppy and produce a ballot that could be misread by the scanners. If the ballot requires punching holes in a card then you can have the problem of “hanging chaff” – the little paper circles may not detach entirely and may flip back in place to cancel the vote.

When designing a voting process there’s always a trade-off between accuracy and efficiency. We could have a perfectly accurate process if we were willing to spend much more time and money to get it. But since most elections are decided by much wider margins than a few hundred votes it’s better to do what we’re doing now: A fast initial count with a larger margin of error followed by an automatic careful recount if the election is very close.

(And this does point up one of the many reasons why the Electoral College is a Good Idea. It limits the scope of close races. Imagine a nationwide recount … [shudder].)