Pennsylvania Paperless Recount

I wrote before that this month's re-count activity in Pennsylvania was notable because of the variety of voting methods used there, and hence the variety of recounting methods needed. In contrast to the Lackawanna county that I mentioned specifically, there are many counties in PA that use completely paperless DRE voting machines. In these cases, there are no actual ballots to recount, nor are there paper-trail tape-rolls to examine. As a result, the recount is more a matter of re-obtaining the vote totals from the DREs, re-doing the tabulation that adds up the machines' vote totals for the recounted contest, in order to re-compute the election result. This is similar in principle to re-counts of PA's old lever machines, where the re-count involved re-inspection of counters on the back of each lever machine. One difference in practice, though, is that the lever machine counters could be directly inspected by a person, who would have little doubt that the totals they gather from each machine were in fact recorded by that machine. The DRE's vote totals are stored re-writable digital storage media that are often separated from the machine itself. And as we saw recently in Myrtle Beach, human error can play a role in that separation.

So, election geek that I am, I'm waiting with interest to hear about the various re-counting methods used, the variances found, how the variance get accounted for, and so on. It should be a very interesting comparison of different means to the same end that one Lackawanna County candidate expressed so well:

Every vote should count. It's hard enough to get the people to come out and vote. ... The election process is under shadow.

Removing that shadow is what PA officials are working hard to do in a scant week of efforts, that along with the efforts of many public-spiritied observers, could teach us all a lot about how recount methods can create transparency as restore trust that every vote counts.

-- EJS