Volunteers are paid here. :-)

There's a recount going on in Virginia in the Attorney General race. The official margin of victory is [link|http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/12/20/AR2005122001409.html|323 votes out of 1.94 M cast]:

Four types of voting machines had been used in the election, complicating matters. Voters in most of the state used optical scanners and touch-screen or lever machines. Individual ballots cannot be recounted on touch-screen and lever machines, but the results can be double-checked from printouts. The judges decided not to rerun ballots through the optical scanners and punch-card machines.

The attorney general's race is the closest statewide election in modern history. State law permits a recount when the margin is less than one percentage point. In this race, the margin was 0.0166 of a percentage point.

Democratic observers allied with Deeds pinpointed discrepancies of just five votes in three precincts, apparently all the result of paper jams when ballots were fed into optical scanners.

The mistakes apparently occurred when poll workers took jammed ballots out of the optical scanner and either ran them through the machine again -- in effect, counting them twice -- or lifted the optical scanner and dropped them in by hand, meaning they were never counted at all.

The machines, which have been used in Loudoun since 1997, reportedly have an error rate of 1 in 4 million, according to county officials. About 60,000 votes were cast in the county in the attorney general's race.


Pencil and paper aren't foolproof either.

FWIW. My final $0.02, I think. :-)

Cheers,
Scott.