WI Paper Ballot Scanners Failed to Count 1000s of Votes in 'Citizens United' Ballot Referendum

[Igel]

10. Why?

Shouldn't they finish counting all the ballots officially before proceeding to a revote?


The official vote hasn't been reported yet. Just the unofficial preliminary one.

It's why they have the official canvassing of the voting machines and records at some remove from the early returns. They look over their systems, consult the checks and balances that they have, and reconcile the number of votes recorded with the number of votes cast. Until then, the machines and records are under seal, and as they go through they verify the initial tallies, make and account for any changes to them, and then firm up the official tally for publication.


In fact, every election there's this litany of voting problems that the press reports. What relatively few notice is that the established process for catching errors and correcting them is the very reason we hear these reports. The errors that nobody catches aren't reported because, well, they're not caught.

The problem with some electronic voting isn't that they don't do an official canvas. It's just that the official canvas is very often just reuploading the same information from the same machines using the same process. The checks and balances and reconciliation aren't usually all that useful. However, even in those cases they sometimes catch errors--a machine that uploaded twice, a machine that didn't upload at all, corrupted data flow causing data string offset errors.