FUCK THE POLICE
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http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/04/opinion/04seife.html?partner=rss&emc=rss
Not Every Vote Counts
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By CHARLES SEIFE
Published: December 4, 2008
THE lizard people have eaten a vote in Beltrami County. That’s not so strange in a recount like the one underway in Minnesota — voters do all kinds of inexplicable things like inscribing “lizard people” in the write-in slot, as one did, invalidating his ballot.
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Much more alarming is that hundreds of votes have disappeared in the still too-close-to-call Senate race between Norm Coleman, the Republican incumbent, and Al Franken, the Democratic candidate. The missing ballots expose a fundamental flaw in our way of doing elections — one that proves the recount in Minnesota is futile.
Before the recount began on Nov. 19, Mr. Coleman and Mr. Franken were within about 200 votes of each other. With a little under three million ballots cast in the election, that margin was unbelievably small: a few thousandths of a percent separated the two candidates. So, as Minnesota law requires, election officials began counting, by hand, every single ballot from the more than 4,000 precincts around the state.
Some missing ballots were misplaced: officials in Ramsey County — to their great embarrassment — discovered 171 uncounted ballots in a compartment of a voting machine. Some errors were typos: a clerical mistake wiped out 25 votes in Blue Earth County.
Others might be due to equipment glitches. A Washington County election official I spoke with blamed jammed ballots in counting machines for possibly creating phantom votes. And some ballots seem to have simply vanished. When I visited Dakota County late last month, I saw an election official and an observer desperately trying to account for the whereabouts of certain absentee ballots. As required by law, the ballots had been duplicated, but the numbers of originals and copies don’t match up — a problem that is apparently happening in several counties.
For example, an auditor in Becker County told me that four original ballots had disappeared. Many other votes are still unaccounted for: 25 in a precinct in Cottonwood County, 10 in another in Pope County and dozens more cast around the state.
Even if all missing ballots are found and all the typos are corrected, the recount is still doomed. Just considering precincts where every ballot is accounted for — where Coleman and Franken observers are not challenging votes — there are mistakes.
How can we know this? Before the recount began, the state ran a post-election review to gauge the accuracy of the voting process. The review involved auditors going into select precincts and, like the recounters, counting by hand, doing the most careful job humanly possible. So in some precincts, we have not just a recount but a re-recount. Both auditors and recounters were hypervigilant to possible sources of error, and yet they disagree on their tallies by about 20 thousandths of a percent.
In an ordinary race, errors this tiny wouldn’t be a problem. But the Coleman-Franken race is so close that this error rate is more than double the margin between the two camps. And that’s just taking into account the precincts where there are no challenges. Throw in the weirdo ballots with lizard people, stray marks and indecipherable dots, and the error rate grows even more. Throw in the missing ballots, and the situation is hopeless. In truth, the counting errors dwarf the tiny numerical difference in votes between the two candidates. If, at the end of the recount, Mr. Coleman or Mr. Franken is ahead by a few dozen or a few hundred votes, that would be because of errors rather than voter preference.
Minnesota’s instruments for counting votes are simply too crude to determine the winner in a race this tight. This is not the state’s fault. In fact, Minnesota’s election laws, procedures and equipment are among the best in the country. The problem is that a voting system that is based on physically recounting chits of paper is inherently error-prone, and in a close election like this, the errors are too large for the process to determine a winner. Even though, at the end of the recount, it will seem as if one candidate has won by a hair, the outcome will really be a statistical tie.
Luckily, Minnesota’s electoral law has a provision for ties. After all the counting and recounting, if the vote is statistically tied, the state should invoke the section of the law that requires the victor to be chosen by lot. It’s hard to swallow, but the right way to end the senatorial race between Mr. Coleman and Mr. Franken will be to flip a coin.
Charles Seife, an associate professor of journalism at New York University, is the author of “Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea” and “Sun in a Bottle: The Strange History of Fusion and the Science of Wishful Thinking.”
Not Every Vote Counts
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* Save
* Share
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Article Tools Sponsored By
By CHARLES SEIFE
Published: December 4, 2008
THE lizard people have eaten a vote in Beltrami County. That’s not so strange in a recount like the one underway in Minnesota — voters do all kinds of inexplicable things like inscribing “lizard people” in the write-in slot, as one did, invalidating his ballot.
Skip to next paragraph
Enlarge This Image
Tucker Nichols
Related
Times Topics: Minnesota
Much more alarming is that hundreds of votes have disappeared in the still too-close-to-call Senate race between Norm Coleman, the Republican incumbent, and Al Franken, the Democratic candidate. The missing ballots expose a fundamental flaw in our way of doing elections — one that proves the recount in Minnesota is futile.
Before the recount began on Nov. 19, Mr. Coleman and Mr. Franken were within about 200 votes of each other. With a little under three million ballots cast in the election, that margin was unbelievably small: a few thousandths of a percent separated the two candidates. So, as Minnesota law requires, election officials began counting, by hand, every single ballot from the more than 4,000 precincts around the state.
Some missing ballots were misplaced: officials in Ramsey County — to their great embarrassment — discovered 171 uncounted ballots in a compartment of a voting machine. Some errors were typos: a clerical mistake wiped out 25 votes in Blue Earth County.
Others might be due to equipment glitches. A Washington County election official I spoke with blamed jammed ballots in counting machines for possibly creating phantom votes. And some ballots seem to have simply vanished. When I visited Dakota County late last month, I saw an election official and an observer desperately trying to account for the whereabouts of certain absentee ballots. As required by law, the ballots had been duplicated, but the numbers of originals and copies don’t match up — a problem that is apparently happening in several counties.
For example, an auditor in Becker County told me that four original ballots had disappeared. Many other votes are still unaccounted for: 25 in a precinct in Cottonwood County, 10 in another in Pope County and dozens more cast around the state.
Even if all missing ballots are found and all the typos are corrected, the recount is still doomed. Just considering precincts where every ballot is accounted for — where Coleman and Franken observers are not challenging votes — there are mistakes.
How can we know this? Before the recount began, the state ran a post-election review to gauge the accuracy of the voting process. The review involved auditors going into select precincts and, like the recounters, counting by hand, doing the most careful job humanly possible. So in some precincts, we have not just a recount but a re-recount. Both auditors and recounters were hypervigilant to possible sources of error, and yet they disagree on their tallies by about 20 thousandths of a percent.
In an ordinary race, errors this tiny wouldn’t be a problem. But the Coleman-Franken race is so close that this error rate is more than double the margin between the two camps. And that’s just taking into account the precincts where there are no challenges. Throw in the weirdo ballots with lizard people, stray marks and indecipherable dots, and the error rate grows even more. Throw in the missing ballots, and the situation is hopeless. In truth, the counting errors dwarf the tiny numerical difference in votes between the two candidates. If, at the end of the recount, Mr. Coleman or Mr. Franken is ahead by a few dozen or a few hundred votes, that would be because of errors rather than voter preference.
Minnesota’s instruments for counting votes are simply too crude to determine the winner in a race this tight. This is not the state’s fault. In fact, Minnesota’s election laws, procedures and equipment are among the best in the country. The problem is that a voting system that is based on physically recounting chits of paper is inherently error-prone, and in a close election like this, the errors are too large for the process to determine a winner. Even though, at the end of the recount, it will seem as if one candidate has won by a hair, the outcome will really be a statistical tie.
Luckily, Minnesota’s electoral law has a provision for ties. After all the counting and recounting, if the vote is statistically tied, the state should invoke the section of the law that requires the victor to be chosen by lot. It’s hard to swallow, but the right way to end the senatorial race between Mr. Coleman and Mr. Franken will be to flip a coin.
Charles Seife, an associate professor of journalism at New York University, is the author of “Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea” and “Sun in a Bottle: The Strange History of Fusion and the Science of Wishful Thinking.”
