Reply #16: There were NO "found votes" in King County. There were ballots that were held out-

[eridani]

--without being counted because of signature matching problems. For years these ballots were just ignored if their total number was less than the difference between candidate vote totals. (Many years of this no harm, no foul attitude left the system unable to handle a real stress test.) King County Council member Larry Phillips did some investigation and found that his absentee ballot was not counted due to signature mismatch, which led to a demand by Democrats that all of the names of voters with signature mismatches be made public. Dems tracked down people who were likely to be supporters, and personally collected new signature forms and hand delivered them to the elections department. The Repukes could have done the same, but chose not to.

The end result was that a state law was passed the following year requiring all county elections departments to notify voters of mismatches once by mail and twice by phone calls to allow them to resubmit signature forms.

BTW, there was machine cheating in Snohomish, where voters complained about touch screens refusing to register votes for Gregoire. Optically scanned ballots in those precincts favored Gregoire, while the machine count favored Rossi. A lawsuit challenging the ES&S proprietary lawsuit failed, so the machine totals were never audited, but accepted as is.

The Diebold opscanning turned out to be acceptable in King County. There were two machine counts (one with central scanning for mail-ins plus polling place scans; the other with all the ballots rescanned centrally) and one handcount (which Repukes unsuccessfully tried to fuck with). All were within 0.1% of each other, and reassuringly, the hand count added a small number of votes to each of the three candidates' totals. (Errors in optical canning tend to be slight undercounts, for the same reason that your printer occassionally picks up more than one piece of paper.)

It is still almost impossible to explain to the scientifically illiterate that we still don't know who won, and cannot know even in principle, because the difference between the two major candidates was less than the 0.1% measurement error rate.