The Minnesota recount, if allowed to go forward without interference by the parties, will be a good test of optical scanners.
How easy it is to make people believe a lie, and how hard it is to undo that work again! (Mark Twain)
How easy it is to make people believe a lie, and how hard it is to undo that work again! (Mark Twain)
The Minnesota recount, if allowed to go forward without interference by the parties, will be a good test of optical scanners.
Piece of Mindful 
Would “interference” include lost trunk ballots?
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Swede, let me be the first to tell you, as everyone who doesn’t watch FOX knows, that that story is nothing. There’s nothing to it. Follow it through to the end, find out for yourself.
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Am I to understand that a “good test” means the Democrat wins?
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A good test means that the hand count is reasonably close to the optical scan count.
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Would mentioning “FOX” here in the comments be a “non sequitor”?
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No, not at all. The trunk ballots comment was not a non sequitur either. It just turned out not to be a story, and everyone but FOX knows that now.
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Testing opt. scanners is the least of my concern. Via the Bermidji Pioneer (a non FOX affiliate).
>>>Beltrami County gave the campaign a list of voters whose ballots were rejected, one of about a dozen counties to fulfill the campaign’s request. Many counties refused, so Franken filed the lawsuit.
The suit is an effort to “strong arm local officials into counting invalid ballots,” Coleman Campaign Manager Cullen Sheehan said.
“This is a new low,” Sheehan said. “This tactic is simply designed to shove more rejected ballots into the ballot box before the recount takes place next week.”<<<
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Optical scanners used in Michigan failed pre-election testing – no matter how many times they ran the same ballots through, they came up with a different count. Optical scanners were easily hacked in the movie Hacking Democracy. They have, to my knowledge, never been tested with a true recount. Here in Bozeman they failed because they were not able to handle folded absentee ballots without jamming.
What Franken is doing sounds perfectly legitimate. He has every right to see rejected ballots. Why not verify that they were legitimately rejected? What’s the problem? I don’t see “strongarm” if courts are used in a legitimate cause. It’s not like they’re going to say “stop the recount, Franken wins”, like the five did for Bush.
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If Franken wins the term of art “jokers in Congress” will not just be figurative.
Viva la gente!
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My distant impression of Franken is not so good. I hope he’s better than his movies.
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WTF? Has anyone except me ever seen “Bedtime for Bonzo”? Yeah, that guy was our President …
(Don’t irritate me about this, or I’ll have to post Youtubes of the “Sonny and Cher” show …)
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What did the lodgepole pine tree say to Sonny when he crashed into it?
I got you, babe.
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The optical scanners in Bozeman failed because the wheels that feed the ballots into the scanner picked up paper residue and gunked up to the point they wouldn’t feed a sheet into the machine. That’s not a failure of the scanning, or the counting.
With recounts I’ve seen it’s normal to recount using the machine. I don’t know how the recount will work in Minnesohtah.
I’m not a Luddite and don’t recommend going back to hand counting each ballot. There’s no “error free” process, not people, who constantly err because our attention wanders, not machines, which are prone to breaking down, not electronic, which leaves no paper trail so their accuracy cannot be verified.
We really are looking for “the least inaccurate yet still verifiable” method of counting ballots.
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So we trust the machines even though we cannot supervise the computer code that runs them. That’s insanity, blind believing run amok.
In Minnesota they are going to count the ballots by hand. That generally doesn’t need to be done, especially when margins are large and are supported by exit polls. Nonetheless, a prudent person would do random auditing of election results to verify the accuracy of the counting machines because 1) they malfunction, and 2) they can be rigged. We don’t trust corporate computers to automatically spit out accurate results – we audit them constantly because they are run by humans. Why are elections different?
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