Recount: What's Going On?

Hardblogger at MSNBC has a pretty good look at how the Ohio recount situation stands:

"Election boards all across Ohio have started counting 'provisional ballots' in the presidential election. These are the ballots that were given to voters who believed they were registered but whose names didn't appear on the precinct list on election day. The verification process may take up to two weeks. In most states, approximately 85 percent of all provisional ballots are eventually verified and counted in the final vote tally. And the early reports out of Ohio suggest the 'count' list in some counties will be as high as 90 percent.

As it stands, there are approximately 155,000 provisional ballots. So, one can expect at least 130,000 ballots to be verified and 'added to the final count.'

There is another number that will eventually come into play in the Buckeye state... and that's the number of 'spoiled ballots.' The Green/Libertarian coalition, through recountohio.org, has already raised enough money to pay for a statewide recount. And the group is now raising even more cash so they can hire recount monitors. A statewide recount will include a visual examination of all 93,000 'spoiled ballots' that indicated 'no' vote for President. (The 'no vote' is usually a machine-tabulation problem because of chads, hanging chads, and etc.) A brilliant e-mailer named Matthew Fox has analyzed which counties reported 'spoiled ballots.' And it does appear that approximately 60 pecent of all the spoiled ballots come from heavily Democratic urban areas.

Can the 'provisional ballots' and 'spoiled ballots' change the Ohio outcome? As it stands, the difference between President Bush and John Kerry is 136,483 votes. When John Kerry decided to concede, here is some of the math his campaign looked at:

If you assume, for the sake of argument, that Kerry receives 80 percent of the 130,000 provisional ballots most observers expect will be validated... Kerry would receive 104,000 votes and President Bush would get 26,000. That's a net gain for John Kerry of 78,000. At that point, the margin between President Bush and Senator Kerry would drop to 58,000 votes.

Now, let's assume a preference can be determined on all 93,000 spoiled ballots. And let's also assume John Kerry receives 80% and President Bush receives 20%. John Kerry would receive 74,400 votes and President Bush would receive 18,600 votes. That's another net gain for John Kerry of 55,800. However, that still leaves John Kerry 3,000 votes short. And remember, the theory that Kerry is going to receive 80% of all provisional and "spoiled" ballots is not realistic. As the Kerry campaign noted on November 3, "the votes are just not going to be there."

However, there is one other number that has been the talk of the Net... and that's the number of "tallies" that might have been hacked or changed by somebody who left some nefarious "code" on the Windows systems tabulating the county by county vote. If that actually happened, it's not clear that a statewide recount would detect such a break-in as it affects "electronic voting" machines. But, given that 70% of Ohio used punch cards... most of the state does have a "paper trail." And the recount, when it happens, should settle these allegations once and for all.

Of course, he has just said that a recount of e-voting machines would not be possible, so in fact it would hardly settle anything, would it? Particularly if the recount of chads etc shows a clear effort to disenfrachise Democrat voters (and it almost certainly will). I suspect the Freedom Of Information appeal by the people at www.blackboxvoting.org will be critical to any chance of real success.