[Lnc-business] audited Judicial Committee results

[Alicia Mattson]

I have finished my audit of the Judicial Committee results.  I’m happy to
report that the data is boring, but I think the implications are important
to know.

On July 16, I wrote to the LNC about this project:

“The JudComm tally happened without the intense time pressures under which
the At-Large tally happened.  I am HOPING that means fewer errors were made
in the tally, but we shall see.  We were all very tired by that point, so
that could prove to have been as big a challenge as the time pressures
were.”

Guess what!  I my audit, I found ZERO real errors made during the Judicial
Committee tally.  The only thing that I found was that two of the write-ins
are clearly ineligible, so they should just be re-classified as “ambiguous
/ ineligible” rather than as a valid “write-in”, though they still get
included in the totals.

Why is that boring result significant?  Those of us doing that tally, late
at night, after the post-convention LNC meeting, we were all very tired.
Lots of yawning in that room.  Yet we got a perfect result.  Delegation
chairs had been subjected to time pressures and noise of the convention
hall, and they made a comparable number of errors on the state tally
sheets.  However, the tellers successfully caught and corrected all those
errors before the results were aggregated and released.

Two key things were different during the Judicial Committee tally, as
compared to the way the other tallies were conducted:

1)      We were in a quiet location, no background noise (like speeches,
voting on resolutions, delegate chatter), under no time pressures, no
multi-tasking of overlapping elections, no other questions interrupting us.

2)      It was organized with a dedicated supervisor (in this case Aaron
Starr), who spent his time watching us tally, and he was a stickler about
making sure we didn’t skip steps in the process.

During past conventions when delegates have insisted on conducting other
noisy business in the background while election tallies were underway, I
was on the stage objecting to it.  It makes the important work of tallying
elections much more difficult.  I wrote about these issues in the “election
anomalies” appendices to both the 2014 and 2016 minutes.

During both the 2016 and 2018 conventions, even the people chairing the
convention struggled with the noise levels in the room, repeatedly calling
for order in the hall.

We adjourned later than usual this year, and because I had already missed
my flight home anyway, it gave me the opportunity this year to put together
a teller team onsite and conduct this Judicial Committee tally under calmer
circumstances.  It’s the first time we’ve been able to do that with a team
of tellers (not just me) to compare the accuracy to tallies that happen
under pressured and noisy circumstances.

During this calmer tally, I worked as a teller, as did the convention
parliamentarian, and Aaron played the dedicated supervisor who trained new
volunteers as they came into the room, pairing everyone with a partner.
When a team found an anomaly, even if they didn’t know how to handle it,
the quiet environment made it easy for them to ask us about it, and Aaron
could confirm what they found.  We could periodically remind each other to
remember to do X.

This worked swimmingly, and we had a clean result.  This demonstrates that
even previously-untrained and very tired human tellers can do an incredibly
clean tally when the conditions are right, but the conditions we create for
the delegation chairs, the Secretary, and the tellers during conventions
will inevitably cause errors.

That’s an important lesson to be learned here.

-Alicia
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