Thoughts on Mandatory Audits: The Brennan's Support...and Question Holt Audits

[Wilms]

How diplomatic...



snip

"Mandating a 10% audit for all races would be a high burden on many States. And in the vast majority of races, a shift of 1% of the votes would not alter the outcome of the race. For that reason, we might say that while less than ideal, we are willing to live with the risk that audits will not catch the 1% counting error in races where such an error is not going to change the outcome of the race.

But in races decided by less than 1% (in recent history, this has represented less than one percent of all federal elections), we might say we are unwilling to accept this risk."

snip

Look out. It's a pdf.

http://www.brennancenter.org/dynamic/subpages/download_file_47860.pdf

[OnTheOtherHand]

1. sigh

It's a pretty disappointing memo. I do agree with them that a tiered audit is preferable to a flat audit -- but imposing the same tiers for House and statewide races means that we audit the bejesus out of some races that don't need it so much, while accepting remarkably high false negative rates in House races that would most benefit from larger audits.

In the first row of the table on page 2 (a race with an 0.5% margin of victory), it's swell that the detection rate is going to increase from 10% to 41%. But I am still waiting for someone to explain to me why it makes sense to settle for 41% confidence -- especially when, as the memo points out, very few races are this close.

Now, don't get me wrong: if the audits do work otherwise, it would be hard to steal lots of seats by taking advantage of this design. The percentages aren't the end of democracy. But if an important purpose of the legislation is to bolster public confidence that the winner is being detected correctly in close elections, why don't we go ahead and do that?

[Peace Patriot]

2. Huh? "What do you mean 'we,' White Man'?"

"...WE are willing to live with the risk that audits will not catch the 1% counting error..." (emphasis added).

Who the hell are THEY, to say this?

We're talking about OUR votes--the votes of the American people--not just THEIR votes--the votes of people who constitute a tiny percentage of the most privileged among us.

"...WE are willing to live with the risk..."???!!!

NO BURDEN IS TOO GREAT FOR THE STATES TO BEAR WHEN IT COMES TO TRANSPARENT VOTE COUNTING.

And, really, it's not that difficult--this fundamental duty of the state in a democratic country, that has been carried out, easily enough, for hundreds of years, and is carried out, today, in OTHER democracies, with virtually no problem whatsoever. For instance, Canada, which has a paper ballot system, handcounts all their ballots in one day. Venezuela--which uses electronic voting, with a paper ballot backup--handcounts FIFTY-FIVE PERCENT of the ballots, as a check against machine fraud.

Not 0% (many states in the US)
Not 1% (the best states in the US)
Not 2% (proposed by Holt II)
Not 10% (mentioned here)
55%! --in Venezuela (check against machine fraud)
100% --in Canada, Germany and other countries (all paper ballot system).

NOBODY--nobody in their right minds, that is--would be handcounting only 0% to 2% of the ballots in an electronic voting system run on "TRADE SECRET," PROPRIETARY programming code, owned and controlled by rightwing Bushite corporations.

The REASON that conducting fully transparent elections--or even elections that are 10% transparent--is PERCEIVED as too great "a burden" is more than likely the BILLIONS AND BILLIONS OF TAXPAYER DOLLARS wasted on crapass, insider hackable, electronic voting systems, owned and controlled by rightwing Bushites--so that there is no money left to count the goddamn votes in a way that everybody can see and understand.

Why is this even a debate?

Sometimes I hate the corporate "liberals" more than I hate the Bushite fascists. WHY IS THIS EVEN A DEBATE?

----------------------------

Throw Diebold, ES&S and all election theft machines into 'Boston Harbor' NOW!

Count 100% of the votes of the American people NOW!

[Wilms]

4. You blew the context by chopping the sentence in half. That's sortof shabby.

The "...we are willing to live with the risk that audits will not catch the 1% counting error..." is better understood with the decapitated qualifying phrase:

"...in races where such an error is not going to change the outcome of the race."

That's a bit different than what you mislead people to believe. :eyes:

The "WE" are as follows:

Lawrence Norden, Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law
Aaron Burstein, Samuelson Law, Technology & Public Policy Clinic, UC Berkeley School of Law
Joseph Hall, School of Information, UC Berkeley
David L. Dill, Department of Computer Science, Stanford University
Candice Hoke, Director, Center for Election Integrity, Cleveland State University
Walter Mebane, Department of Government, Cornell University
Freddie Oakley, Yolo County, CA, Clerk-Recorder
Ronald L. Rivest, MIT EECS Department
David Wagner, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences, UC Berkeley

Google them, as I'm sure you'll appreciate at least a few of them (now that you've maligned them).

As a footnote, the letter adds:

* The authors’ affiliations are provided for identification purposes only. The views expressed in this memorandum are the authors’ personal views. The authors do not purport to represent the views of their respective institutions.

So that's who they are. You can write a letter, too. Just be sure to mention pod people so the rant is taken seriously.

[Bill Bored]

3. The fact is, there is NOTHING in this bill to require a manual Recount

of Voter-Verified Paper Ballots in Federal elections -- except possibly for an as yet undefined discrepancy in one of these so-called audits -- even if the margin of the race in question is ZERO VOTES! Can you say "FLORIDA 2000?"

This is a change from HR 550 which DID require the paper to be used as the ballot of record in all audits and recounts of all federal elections.