[Tycho]

Confused, I thought we found out last year that machine counting and absentee voting in the US were incredibly robust systems that nobody need worry about, or baselessly question. Now we hear about a single city count error that is actually several times larger than the entire national margin of victory in the last presidential election?

[TechBro8615]

My favorite contrast is CNN describing Adams as having “well-founded worries.” Apparently that’s the opposite of “baseless claims.”

[kthejoker2]

Confused, this error was easily spotted and is being addressed. Are you suggesting similar errors occurred in a much more improtant election but somehow escaped detection by bipartisan investigators?

Also, who said you couldn't question them? They were and always will be questioned.

[thu2111]

It was spotted by someone claiming statistical irregularities in the movement of vote tallies between rounds and demanding an investigation, which this time, they got.

Last year there were also lots of claims of statistical irregularities in the movement of vote tallies, and demands for investigations, which they mostly didn't get. Or in which they got a fake investigation at least - I remember seeing one video someone had secretly filmed inside a counting centre where some volunteers doing a recount were trying to report that a large run of ballots had identical signatures, and the overseer was telling them to ignore it, that it wasn't their job to report fraudulent ballots!

You're also making the rather generous assumption that this was an actual error. As other commenters observe, "test ballots" for which you need >100k of them, which contain real candidates names and which are posted to the production database do not sound like any defensible testing strategy. If it's genuine incompetence it's of the form that in the civil engineering world would send people to prison.

[dariusj18]

> statistical irregularities

Numbers not adding up is a simpler term and takes away some of the pseudo-mystique.

[scotuswroteus]

by margin of victory, do you mean margin in the popular vote? what an INTERESTING way to calculate the winner of a national presidential election.

[seanicus]

Is that like the Arizona audit which couldn't find any issues and has now been sent off for impartial review by a floridaman who's into conspiracies?