How Can You Be Sure? That results are “plausible” is besides the point.

How Can You Be Sure?

Vendor Failures and Lax Security Procedures Call Election Results Into Question In States Across The Country

By Warren Stewart, VoteTrustUSA
June 11, 2006

snip

The fact that the official results are “plausible” in California’s special election is beside the point. In fact, if the corrupted results had been “plausible” in Pottawattamie County, there would have been no scrutiny and losing candidates would have been elected.

After a publicly observed hand count of the ballots, voters can be reasonably confident in the results of elections in Pottawattmie County. Without a similar hand count of the California special election, voters have no reason to believe the official results are accurate.

snip

http://www.votetrustusa.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1385&Itemid=26


Also...

Talking Points Memo On Elections

by Dave Berman

June 11, 2006

snip

1. Secret vote counting guarantees inconclusive outcomes. Whether it is paperless DREs or optical scanners with interpreted or proprietary code, votes are being "counted" in secret, without even a chance for voters, elections officials or the media to examine the process or verify the results.

2. Unverified voting means there is NO BASIS for confidence in the results reported. Blind trust is required to accept current election results.

3. The media should not report what it cannot prove or independently verify. We now have faith-based reporting about faith-based elections.

4. The Consent of the Governed is being assumed, not sought, under current election conditions. According to the Declaration of Independence, the "just Power" of government derives from the Consent of the Governed.

snip/more

http://wedonotconsent.blogspot.com/2006/06/talking-points-memo-on-elections-for.html

Then I just discovered a new black hole. Its close to the star cluster M54. You can't see it, but its plausible. I hearby name it after myself. ;)

counting, unless you hand count every election (or at the very least, hand count a random 3-5% of every election). Therein lies the problem. I don't think hand counting every election is going to happen - the challenger in most states has to pay for (at least part of) it if the results aren't changed.

Which has a low chance of catching aberrations in a statewide race, and almost none for catching a problem in a local race.

The closer it is, the more auditing has to be done to confirm the result.

But you are correct that the more precincts there are, the easier it is find the "lemons" that could change the outcome. This is because there are more corrupt precincts required to do so, and also because a X% audit will sample more precincts.

Defenders of Holt will say that 2% is "only the minimum" audit. But if it's clean, what will trigger more auditing? This problem has yet to be tackled in any serious way that I've seen, but a few of us are working on it.

In a US House race with about 400 precincts, you'd need to audit 25% to get the same odds of detecting vote count fraud as you would with a 2% audit of a statewide race with thousands of precincts.

What Holt and some other laws and regs don't take into account is that you have to consider each race on the ballot as a separate auditable election.