Eureka Reporter: Group plans parallel election to check June 6 results

[GuvWurld]

http://www.eurekareporter.com/ArticleDisplay.aspx?ArticleID=10746

Group plans parallel election to check June 6 results
by Rebecca S. Bender, 5/1/2006

As the June 6 primary election nears, the Voter Confidence Committee is organizing volunteers for its own, concurrent poll. For the second year in a row, the nonprofit watchdog group will be holding a parallel election to check hand-counted, paper results against the official election tallies, as reported by the increasingly controversial electronic voting machines.

“We know that the vote-counting equipment is not in compliance with the law, which equates to counting ballots in secret,” Voter Confidence Committee co-founder Dave Berman said. “We know that if we want verifiable results, we have to count them ourselves.”

(snip)

Humboldt County Elections Manager Lindsey McWilliams said that the results of that effort were essentially meaningless. “Despite what Dave (Berman) claims, ... it really didn’t show anything statistically relevant,” he said. “To do something that’s statistically significant, they need tight controls — and they don’t have those.”

(snip)

“(T)here are real-world examples that show the value of parallel elections extend further than this basis for statistically significant comparison,” he (Berman) said in an e-mail. He referred to one instance where a parallel election revealed a ballot error, and another that indicated more people had voted for a candidate than official results showed.

Ultimately, he pointed out, the parallel elections highlight the tenuous nature of election results under the current system. “Short of a complete hand count of the official paper ballots of record (which the VCC has long advocated), the results of Humboldt elections are not verifiable,” he wrote. “Should we be expected to ‘prove’ something that the elections department itself can neither prove nor disprove?”

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[kster]

1. Kick n Recommended........ nt

[Land Shark]

2. In the spirit of elections manager Lindsey Williams and e-voting, should

you not do the study and CLAIM rigorous methodology and mathematics, yet refuse to disclose them as a TRADE SECRET? You think I'm kidding or that this would simply be a spoof to illustrate the problem, but no.... Such methods are the very thing that Mitofsky, e-vendors and everyone else protects as trade secrets. You should, as well. They simply can't criticize or rebut your poll either, without the information and the data, which you can trade for the election data, even up.

Or, propose that we flip a coin and use that method to decide which election method to follow.

I'm serious. There's no basis to select one over the other as more accurate. So, flip a coin.

[Wilms]

3. I don't know how Guv feels about going Trade Secret, but here's a coin.

[skids]

4. What a great soundbite/wordbite!

“Should we be expected to ‘prove’ something that the elections department itself can neither prove nor disprove?”

...nice!