What causes minor variations in the recount?
Most of the counties that have posted recount results to date are posting variations in the 1 to 5 vote range. These kinds of variations usually result from operator error in feeding ballots through a tabulator and where one or two ballots are processed more than once, or where a voter has marked a ballot too lightly and the tabulator is not able to read a vote. Another example would be where the original ballot was processed without a hand inspection of the ballot and upon hand inspection in the recount process evidence of voter intent results in a different vote being recorded. An example of this might be where the voter in an optical scan county did not fill in an oval for Governor on the ballot, but wrote Dino Rossi on the line for write-ins. Because the oval was not completed in the original count, the tabulator would not have recorded a vote for Dino Rossi. In the recount, the ballot would have been hand inspected and a ballot created to record a vote for Dino Rossi since the vot
Variations usually result from operator error in feeding ballots through a tabulator and where one or two ballots are processed more than once, or where a voter has marked a ballot too lightly and the tabulator is not able to read a vote. Another example would be where the original ballot was processed without a visual inspection of the ballot and upon visual inspection in the recount process evidence of voter intent results in a different vote being recorded. These kinds of variations can result in slight variations in vote count.
