It’s Inauguration Day, But The Election Isn’t Over Yet
If you had a room filled with 2,885,555 pennies, could you count them by hand and come up with the correct total? Could you do it twice, or three times, and come up with the same number? Probably not, but that’s exactly what election officials in Minnesota have been trying to do since November.
Barack Obama will be sworn in as our 44th President today, 77 days after the November 4th election. In that same 77 days, the state of Minnesota has been unable to determine the winner of the Senate race between Norm Coleman and Al Franken. The outcome will eventually be decided in court since the results of the voting were too close to determine a statistically reliable margin of victory for either candidate.
Out of 2,885,555 ballots cast in Minnesota, the difference between the two candidates in the recount is a mere 225 votes, or .0078% of the total. This situation is nearly identical to the 2004 race for the Governor’s office in the state of Washington. In that contest, the winner was also determined by a hand recount with a margin of 133 votes out of 2,810,058 ballots cast, or .0047% of the total. In both cases, the margin of victory is far too small to be trusted to a process as potentially unreliable as counting by hand.
Let’s take away the politically charged atmosphere surrounding the recount, along with any incentive that either side may have to cheat. Let’s also set aside any consideration of illegible, absentee or provisional ballots, or the fact that precincts in both states reported higher combined vote totals for the two candidates than the actual number of ballots cast. Forget about counting votes and think instead in terms of bottle caps or baseball cards. Consider only the challenge of counting 2.8 million of anything by hand and coming up with a reliable result. I am not a mathematician, but my inclination is to believe that the margin of error for this kind of hand counting procedure is probably greater than .0047%
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They don’t count the votes at a state level, but in each precinct. And someone takes a pile of ballots, counts it, and writes down the total. Then the pile of ballots is handed off to someone else who does the same. So each stack is counted twice. The key to a reliable hand count is sectioning. Each precinct is required to count their own ballots. As long as each precinct is accurate, then it’s just adding totals on a spread sheet.
This is little different than counting money. If you came into a bank with 2 million $1 bills, they’d require that you first had them in stacks of $25. They’ll still count each stack to verify each stack has $25, but after that they’re just going to add up the number of stacks.
John,
I understand how the process is supposed to work, but the problem is that the precinct counts are not accurate. I don’t know if the problem is a result of fraud or human error, but when precincts report vote tallies that are greater than the number of ballots cast, it’s hard to have much faith in the process.