<BLOCKQUOTE class="ip-ubbcode-quote"><div class="ip-ubbcode-quote-title">quote:</div><div class="ip-ubbcode-quote-content">Originally posted by alaric520:<BR>Just how do you know that? Why were the election officials doing that if not to hide discrepancies between the tally and the stated results? Just how many "alterations" were there? Do you know. Have you looked. <BR><BR>Under ohio law, if the sample does not match the reported results a wider examination is conducted. It looks like those election officials sought to avoid that and you have to ask why? <BR><BR>In fact, it suggests that the election results would have been changed. </div></BLOCKQUOTE><BR><BR>There's no evidence that this would have changed the results in any determinable way.<BR><BR>The criteria of matching 3% of the precints determines whether the official recount will be by hand or by machine.<BR><BR>These two figures may well be different, but the only way it will be predictably different would be if someone took the paper ballots and modified them so that the machine would record them differently than a person would. (I imagine there's something more sophisticated than white out and a marker, but this line of analysis doesn't depend on the specific implementation.)<BR><BR>This would affect the recount and not the original count unless someone could make this change election night before the ballots are fed into the machine, which I imagine is harder than changing them after election night.<BR><BR>Assuming this happened, why were the ballots separated into bush/kerry stacks? The person making this change would have known about the 3% rule and wouldn't have changed the results for all precincts, but only some precincts. Hence if the officials were involved they wouldn't have to count any precincts by hand, but merely pick "at random" the ones that were intentionally left unmodified.<BR><BR>In other words the scenario laid out above requires:<BR>-ballots were modified so that hand counting and machine counting will vary<BR>-some set of precincts were changed and others not<BR>-the officials knew this had happened and were in collusion<BR>-but the officials didn't know which precincts were kept pristine as part of the effort to cover up the election tampering<BR><BR><BR>Keeping the stacks sorted and admitting they weren't random is further evidence that the election officials weren't intentionally doing something fraudulent. Otherwise we have to assume the officials were pretty clever most of the time and then boneheadedly stupid while the tape was rolling. ooops! (At least they didn't record themselves doing it and then post the video to youtube!)<BR><BR>It seems like this was just a misguided attempt to save the county some money.<BR><BR>Michael
