[EL] Virginia AG recount reflects average margin shift of 0.03%

[Michael P McDonald]

What I believe the Virginia experience reveals is not so much as to whether a recount changes results, but rather that election technology affects how voters make mistakes on their ballots. In 2005, Virginia held a recount for the Attorney Generals race and the Republican candidate, Bob McDonnell, gained 37 votes further padding his lead. Then, the only ballots to be recounted in Virginia were paper mail ballots since all localities in the state had adopted DREs for in-person voters (both on election day and for in-person absentee voters). In an excuse-required state like Virginia, absentee mail voters are more likely to support Republican candidates. In the intervening years some Virginia localities adopted optical scan ballot for in-person voters, particularly some of the largest Democratic localities like Fairfax County. In the 2013 recount, the Democratic candidate. Mark Herring, added some 750 or so votes to his lead according to his attorney, Mark Elias. Herring benefited from two factors: more Democratic voters used optical scan because the uneven adoption of new voting systems and Democrats are more likely to mis-record their votes using optical scan. If McDonnell had trailed in 2005 or Herring in 2013, the recount would have had a greater chance of reversing the outcome. We just happened to have winning candidates in these two cases on the right side of the direction of the potential votes to be added through a recount. It would not have been out of the question if a few more Democratic jurisdictions had adopted optical scan for Herring to have been trailing in the certified election results prior to the recount.

I'm not saying that DREs are superior to optical scan, but they have some virtues that the debate concerning the security of DRE systems has overshadowed. For this reason I'm much in favor of hybrid systems where DREs assist voters in marking their ballots to help minimize voter error.

============
Dr. Michael P. McDonald
Associate Professor
George Mason University
4400 University Drive - 3F4
Fairfax, VA 22030-4444

phone:   703-993-4191 (office)
e-mail:  mmcdon at gmu.edu               
web:     http://elections.gmu.edu
twitter: @ElectProject

From: law-election-bounces at department-lists.uci.edu [mailto:law-election-bounces at department-lists.uci.edu] On Behalf Of Rob Richie
Sent: Thursday, December 19, 2013 11:07 AM
To: Election Law
Subject: [EL] Virginia AG recount reflects average margin shift of 0.03%

As a tag to Chris Ashby's very useful blogpost linked below, I wanted to flag that the margin shift in the Virginia AG race recount reflected the 0.03% average margin change in the now-23 statewide recounts that have taken place in 2000-2013. See our blogpost by legal fellow Mollie Hailey from earlier in the year based on our research in this area and a table on the 22 recounts through last year:
http://www.fairvote.org/statewide-recounts-remain-scarce-zero-in-201
http://www.fairvote.org/assets/FairVote-Recounts-2000-to-2012-Table.pdf

To put that in perspective, that means 99.5% of statewide elections did not go to recount --and most of the recounts that were triggered had little chance to change the outcome. Note that many states still will pay for recounts where the initial margin is 0.5%, which is more than 15 times larger than the average shift in margin and nearly five times higher than the single largest margin shift (the Vermont auditor's race in 2006, where there had been bigger errors than usual in towns doing hand-tallies).

While the shift in margin was predictably small, it also was a good bit more than the initial margin in this exceptionally close election -- showing that the recount was most certainly warranted.

- Rob Richie, FairVote

 

Posted in bribery, chicanery 
Don't Miss Chris Ashby's Five Takeaways from the #VAAG Recount 
Posted on December 18, 2013 2:52 pm by Rick Hasen 
Here.

 
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