Over time, people adopt the reigning narratives of the moment, resist those that require effort & shame those that keep fighting.
— Heather Havrilesky (@hhavrilesky) November 20, 2016
Brace yourself for a lifetime of uncool. It's the only way to stand up for what's right.
— Heather Havrilesky (@hhavrilesky) November 20, 2016
What’s on the agenda (Thanksgiving-releated or not) as we gear up for the new week?
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Not sure where the following falls on the ‘non-cool but necessary’ to ‘pure political kabuki’ spectrum, but it seems worth mentioning. Op-ed, from USA Today — “Still time for an election audit“:
A Washington Post–ABC News poll found that 18% of voters — 33% of Clinton supporters and 1% of Trump supporters — think Trump was not the legitimate winner of the election. Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., has called on Congress to investigate the Russian cyberattack on the Democratic National Committee and the election…
We know that the national results could be tipped by manipulating the vote count in a relatively small number of jurisdictions — a few dozen spread across a few key states. We know that the vast majority of local elections officials have limited resources to detect or defend against cyberattacks. And while pre-election polls have large uncertainties, they were consistently off. And various aspects of the preliminary results, such as a high rate of undervotes for president, have aroused suspicion…
A full manual recount of the paper records would be definitive, but that’s unnecessarily difficult, expensive and time-consuming if the results are actually right.
There’s an easier way: an audit that manually examines a random sample of the ballots in a way that has a large chance of detecting and correcting incorrect results. This is called a “risk-limiting” audit. If the reported winner of a contest really won, a risk-limiting audit generally needs to examine only a small fraction of the ballots. But if the reported winner actually lost, a risk-limiting audit has a large chance of indicating that a full hand count is needed to set the record straight.
Risk-limiting audits are a crucial check on election integrity and accuracy even when elections are not controversial and margins are wide. They have been endorsed by the Presidential Commission on Election Administration and many organizations concerned with election integrity…
Ron Rivest is Institute Professor at MIT and was a member of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission Technical Guidelines Development Committee. Philip Stark, associate dean of mathematical and physical sciences at the University of California, Berkeley,was appointed to the board of advisers of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission.
Demand An Audit Of The 2016 Presidential Election – Sign the Petition! https://t.co/blV25MFep8 via @Change
— Heather Havrilesky (@hhavrilesky) November 20, 2016
Monday Morning Open Thread: Truth, Justice…Post + Comments (260)