re: GA - Identical Ballots Found in Analysis of Scanned Ballot Images - Scan, Flip Rescan

quote:

---

When Sterling says “hand tally,” he is making it sound like people went through the ballots by hand. That is not accurate, correct?

---

quote:

---

Steven Rosenfeld: You have some concerns about Georgia’s audit.

Philip Stark: There’s this term flying around called “risk-limiting audit.”

SR: You created it. This exercise in Georgia is not that.

PS: People are defining it to suit their convenience. Let’s not worry about the terminology, but instead focus on what voters actually would like to have. I would claim that voters would like to have confidence that the reported winners really won. That’s what this is all about. And that the risk that they care about is the risk that an incorrect outcome will be certified.

SR: Right, for all kinds of reasons.

PS: When I invented risk-limiting audits, that is the risk I was talking about, and that was the risk that was being limited (by this kind of audit). And in order to do that, you need a trustworthy paper trail of votes. Among other things, even if can trust that every piece of paper accurately reflects what the voters said, they need to keep track of the paper and keep it secure. And a precursor to doing a statistical risk-limiting audit that you have a complete inventory of the paper, so that you can draw a random sample of the paper.

SR: I understand. It’s not an easy thing to do. And Georgia didn’t do that.

PS. The way that Gabe [Sterling, the state’s elections operations manager] is being incredibly misleading about all of this is saying, ‘Look how great it was that we audited and we uncovered the fact that some batches of ballots were never scanned, and some memory cards [from ballot scanners with vote totals] were never uploaded and what not. All of that has nothing to do with the risk-limiting audit. That is all a precursor to starting a risk-limiting audit.

SR: You’re saying that the lapses they found should have been found and fixed earlier.

PS: Yes. Those are all ballot accounting measures. They’re standard canvass activities. They’re reconciliation measures like checking the number of poll book signatures against the number of ballots, so that you have a separate physical count of the number of ballots against the reported tallies from the voting machines. That is all stuff you have to do before you start the audit.

If you don’t have control over how many ballots there are, you would never notice if there were 100,000 ballots missing from the machine totals. Right? So, one fundamental flaw in what Georgia is doing is they’re relying on the voting system to tell them how many ballots there are, rather than relying on other procedures and cross checks to tell them how many ballots there are. Because some ballots were never scanned and some memory cards were never uploaded, the voting system doesn’t know about those ballots, and a random sampling based RLA would not have had any chance of selecting those ballots. The sample needs to be drawn from a comprehensive list of ballots, not just the ballots the voting system happens to have a record of.

---

quote:

---

Wonder how many democrats would find it acceptable if tax collections were handled as "sloppy" as voting ballots?

---

quote:

---

I cannot find that Gabriel tweet. Is it gone?

---

quote:

---

This seems like a smoking gun if there weren't already numerous ones.

---

quote:

---

One type of error discovered involved duplicate results reporting for batches of ballots. The team
found at least 36 batches of mail-in ballots with 4,255 total extra votes were redundantly added
into Fulton Co. audit results for the November election. These illicit votes include 3,390 extra
votes for Joe Biden, 865 extra votes for Donald Trump and 43 extra votes for Jo Jorgenson.

---