| Errors of the last two types are highly unlikely given the closeness of the outcome. Before transmitting the official results on Wednesday, clerks around the state knew the importance of triple checking their work. Furthermore, the double blind entry of data at the state election office assured the state that it was identifying and resolving those issues right away.
Indeed, after all this careful work Shumlin's lead increased by around a dozen votes. And the final results, when you look at them by county and town, all fit into patterns that don't raise any red flags where one might say "golly, did Lamoile county mix up Matt Dunne's results with Susan Bartlett's?
Now the question becomes how many of the other two types of errors were there? Well, the state bar for demanding a recount is for the vote differential to be under 2%. This implies that the state anticipates a 1% error rate in vote counting and reporting -- because a 1% error can turn a 2% victory into a tie.
This in turn means that there may be around 750 errors out there. Random errors -- we've already decided that nobody thinks there was fraud anywhere.
How will random errors distribute themselves?
Randomly.
This means that each candidate's error rate will be in proportion to the votes they attracted. Doug and Peter would both be expected to have around 180 errors. If they broke 50-50, they both wind up in the same place. But they won't break 50-50 because of the other candidates in the race. Instead the votes Peter loses will go proportionally to Doug, Deb, Matt and Susan. And the votes Doug loses will go to Peter, Deb, Matt and Susan.
It's the involvement of the other 5 candidates that make the recount extremely unlikely to change the outcome if the errors are random.
Since nobody in the Racine camp is pointing out to problems with the vote totals out of a particular county or town, I'm not sure why they think there is more than a one-in-a-thousand chance that the random errors will break in Doug's favor. In effect, they are saying that in 180 flips of their own coin they are going to come up heads 2/3rds of the time, and that when Peter flips his coin 180 times he's going to come up tails 2/3rds of the time and so will Deb, Matt and Susan -- and that the benefit of all the 'tails' flips will be in Doug's favor.
That's a very, very, very, very, very, very steep hill of probability to climb. |
250-1
75-1
