Subject: Re: [EL] nailbiter in Wisconsin Supreme Court race
From: Joseph Lorenzo Hall
Date: 4/7/2011, 11:30 AM
To: Josh Douglas
CC: Election Law <election-law@mailman.lls.edu>

I also found this description of the recount statute to be interesting:

http://theuptake.org/2011/04/06/how-a-recount-works-in-wisconsin/

I don't think I appreciated how much care the statute takes to make
sure that ballots in a ballot box are randomly chosen and set aside
until the number of ballots matches the number of valid voter
signatures/absentee envelopes.  Only then does the recount
(retabulation, actually) begin.  The procedure for randomly choosing a
ballot isn't specified and that seems unfortunate as, for example,
opscan ballots don't naturally "shuffle" when they fall into a voting
bin (technically, the container needs to be relatively deep and 1.5
times the longest ballot dimension before we would expect a decent
amount of natural shuffling just by the paper drop).

best, Joe

-- Joseph Lorenzo Hall ACCURATE Postdoctoral Research Associate UC Berkeley School of Information Princeton Center for Information Technology Policy http://josephhall.org/ _______________________________________________ election-law mailing list election-law@mailman.lls.edu http://mailman.lls.edu/mailman/listinfo/election-law