Nate Silver gives a good argument that we should automatically audit our elections. In other words, we should regularly check our elections for irregularity, not just when the count is close. It shouldn’t be a recount, it should be an audit that is always done for every major election.
He compares it to a cancer test, which should be done regularly in order to make sure there is no big problem lurking.
Sliver also talks about the risks of doing this. Back to the cancer analogy, there is always the danger of a false positive, which could unduly undermine confidence in an election result. But making an audit a regular thing rather than something that is only triggered when the results already look irregular, will help allay that.
I completely agree. We need to have trust in our voting systems, and currently we have little data to give us that trust. We need some kind of audit.
4 Comments
I couldn’t agree more. Everything else gets audited, even things of far smaller import, with much better track records.
Now, how do we start making this happen?
Everyone should read this — best summary ever: http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/40381-how-the-gop-flipped-and-stripped-yet-another-american-election
Just came across this one, too — the voice of reason: https://medium.com/@jhalderm/want-to-know-if-the-election-was-hacked-look-at-the-ballots-c61a6113b0ba#.8podo7ncb
Quite a turnaround from the previous position of the left that there is none to only negligible chance of fraud when their guy wins. Sounds like hypocrisy to me. Check your posts, I bet there are examples where dems (of which I am one) who defiantly stated there is no evidence of voter fraud, but only argued about voter suppression. So as a recent contributor posted to another article about Trump being a sore winner, I guess that makes a lot of folks sore losers.
Oh, yes… by all means, audit. In this election already, one person voted twice for Trump (in Iowa) and the recount has found sixteen (16!) additional votes for Jill Stein and two (2!!) for Trump elsewhere!