[Lnc-business] audited Judicial Committee results

[Caryn Ann Harlos]

The conditions under which counting is expected to happen on the
convention floor is absolutely intolerable.  That is part and parcel
of the issue of election hygiene.  In addition to leading to more
errors, it makes it impossible to correct any errors since only the
convention can do so [RONR p. 446].  The Convention Rules change that
was passed changing the order the business will help this tremendously
even in the absence of needed modernization like electronic voting.

-Caryn Ann

On Thu, Aug 2, 2018 at 11:54 PM, Alicia Mattson via Lnc-business
<lnc-business at hq.lp.org> wrote:
> 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
>
>



-- 
-- 
In Liberty,
Caryn Ann Harlos
Libertarian Party and Libertarian National Committee Secretary -
Caryn.Ann. Harlos at LP.org or Secretary at LP.org.
Chair, LP Historical Preservation Committee - LPedia at LP.org

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