Joe Six-Pack and D&D...
Daniel Macht of Sacramento's Capitol Weekly interviewed me for a story published today ("When Dungeons & Dragons meets California elections ") talking about the work of the CA SoS's working group on Post-Election Audit Standards.
The editor who wrote the headline seemed to want to push the "Joe Six-Pack" and "Dungeons and Dragons" angle, which is too bad... those are great, sexy and light-hearted items but are better used as instructional analogies rather than placeholders for reality.
I excerpt some pieces of the story below. I don't feel I was misquoted (as we all so often are)... but I have to say a few things. First, I think this is an area where it is of utmost importance that election officials and academics work together to find a practical and effective way forward. Second, I didn't ever endorse the Holt audit prescription for California. I said that California needs to be thinking about moving in a direction similar to that one; where there is some margin-dependent audit, some decent-sized fixed percentage audit and predictable audit percentages for election officials.
When Dungeons & Dragons meets California elections
By Daniel Macht
If Florida 2000 was the year of pregnant and hanging chads, California 2008 could be known as the year Joe Six-Pack meets a 10-sided die--a la Dungeons & Dragons, the fantasy role-playing game. The idea is that rolling dice is an easy and efficient way to prove to citizens that precincts chosen for post-election audits are truly random. [...]
Academics, voting advocates and statisticians argue, though, that 1 percent is too small a sample in close races for voters to be confident their will is being carried out. "The closer the election gets, the harder it is to detect bad things that can happen that could make a difference in an election," said Joe Hall, a Ph.D. candidate from UC Berkeley who spoke before the working group two weeks ago. "The amount of precincts that could flip the outcome of a race becomes small quickly," Hall said. Hall advocates a system for California based on what proposed federal legislation offers. The bill, HR 811, would require a tiered percentage of manual audits based on the closeness of federal races. If the margin is less than 1 percent, 10 percent of precincts should be audited, Hall said.
Kim Alexander, president of the California Voter Foundation, and a member of the working group, said an increased audit sample will help voters have more faith in the system. She points to a statewide survey her organization conducted of eligible but non-registered voters, which found that nearly one in four felt their votes wouldn't be counted accurately, so why bother.
Hall acknowledged any increase in audit sample size would have a big impact on large counties. Still, small procedures--like using a 10-sided die to choose random precincts to audit, instead of randomly generated computer codes--also would help ensure voters' faith in the integrity of the process. "If I'm Joe Six-Pack, all I see is someone hitting return on a computer and a bunch of numbers come up. … There's no way for me to verify that it came from a random process," Hall said. [...]