Re:Dominion Voting Systems Sues Rudy Giuliani
by unanswered on Monday January 25, 2021 @04:30PM
(#25909181)
Something that struck me about the Arizona hand recount numbers: most of the reporting precincts(? - I use this term in a general sense, I don't remember how the numbers were grouped) reported that hand counts in batches of about 1000 votes showed an accuracy of about 99%, i.e., on the order of 5-10 ballots incorrectly counted (again, rough numbers from memory). But then some of the precincts reported "nope, we found 100% accuracy; no discrepancies", for the same batch sizes. That struck me as odd. There wasn't a spectrum where 0-10 or even 0-20 were the outliers; it was bimodal around 5-10 and 0. Or whatever the actual numbers were, my point is bimodality with a mode at 0. That was odd.
Re:Dominion Voting Systems Sues Rudy Giuliani
by kube-system on Monday January 25, 2021 @04:56PM
(#25909478)
I think it's relatively common for errors caused by engineering processes to exhibit a pattern that isn't evenly distributed.
As a made up example: maybe some precincts had scanners that worked 100% perfectly, and some had units that occasionally mis-scanned with a rhythm.
You can't say that without saying how large the sample is. Certainly, if the random sample size is "100% of all ballots" it would be enough.
Risk Limiting Audits take that into account. There's a rigorously backed formula for determining how big the sample size needs to be based on the margin of victory. The closer the election, the more ballots are included in the sample.
In fact, you're right that a _very_ narrow margin requires a random sample that ends up being very nearly or actually all votes.
Georgia is a perfect example of this. Georgia applied a Risk Limiting Audit to the Presidential Election. Because the margin was so close, the RLA required them to sample every single ballot cast. The first "complete hand recount" of Georgia was actually a Risk Limiting Audit.
Here is the GA SOS reporting out the results of that first statewide hand recount: https://sos.ga.gov/index.php/elections/historic_first_statew...