Why There Should Be A Recount

Ars Technica:

The fact that optical scanners leave a paper record is totally irrelevant if a random audit of the results is not mandatory by law after every election. And in New Hampshire, there are no mandatory audits. As I've said before, mandating a paper trail without also requiring post-election audits is like buying a security system for your house and then not turning it on.

Ron Paul and his supporters may be a bit loopy, but they are 100 percent correct in insisting on some type of audit of the NH results—not because Hillary hacked the vote (I currently think there are better explanations for the results than vote hacking), but because such audits should always occur as a matter of course. Again, when you use an electronic voting system, you must audit the results if you want to have confidence in them.

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In a truly democratic election, the burden of proof is on the state to provide evidence of the election's integrity. This sentiment is behind the idea that ballots should be counted under the watchful eyes of the public's representatives. So elections are held to a much different standard than criminal proceedings, where the burden of proof is on the one who brings a charge of wrongdoing.

Right now, in the absence of an audit of the New Hampshire results, the state has not met the requirement that it prove to the public that the election was fair. This is what the fuss is about. New Hampshire does not have the manual audit requirement that is necessary to prove that an election was fair, so that state's ballots were effectively counted in secret by closed-source machine code. When ballots are counted in secret and it's up to the voters to prove that the election was rigged when they're surprised by the results, that's not the kind of democracy that the Founders had in mind for us.

Go read the whole thing. Then demand a recount. Our democracy is worth being certain.