I used to teach some of those electronic voting machines.NcongruNt wrote:Hrm. How does one do a "recount" these days? I mean, if the count on the electronic machines changes with a "recount", then we've obviously got bigger issues than one close election.
Anyone care to educate me? I don't see how a ballot count can change with the new technologies that are supposedly flawless.
A "recount" should not change the count, but it can cast the accuracy of the machine into doubt. What is done with the ones I used to teach on, is the machine is audited and the count compared with the numbers of ballots cast. Depending on the machine and the number of votes the granularity can even get down to tallying which votes were cast on which ballot, and if they were paper ballots counted by a machine, they can be counted manually if the audit trail and the machine's count do not match.
Some of the electronic machines (ES&S Ivotronics) keep a printed record of each ballot cast, and these could be compared to the machine's count in a recount, verifying that the actual number reflects what the machine recorded.
Before anyone starts going off on me about knowing who voted which way, the paper ballot counters do not necessarily stack the ballots in order after they are counted. I worked with two different counters, one a precinct level machine where the ballots fell into a bin and were stacked semi-randomly, and the other a central voting district machine where someone is feeding all of the ballots from all of the precincts into it. Either one would require some fancy record keeping and a pretty broad conspiracy to defeat secrecy.
In most precincts using electronic machines, there are usually multiple machines per precinct, and even the ones that only had one would still require making notes of who voted in which order in order to be able to determine, from deeply password protected records, what was done on a particular ballot.
Believe me, we instructors played with these ideas until we convinced ourselves, and we even had the passwords for the demo ballots - no way to change ballots and extremely hard to determine a particular ballot.
Having said all that, there will still be candidates that won't believe they lost, just like Al Gore, and they will do everything they can to slow down and subvert the process. Most of them seem to be hoping, these days, to find enough invalid votes, not a miscount, to change the results.