“Saving throw: securing democracy with stats, spreadsheets, and 10-sided dice”

Ars Technica offers this extensive report, which begins: “Armed with a set of 10-sided dice (we’ll get to those in a moment), an online Web tool, and a stack of hundreds of ballots, University of California-Berkeley statistics professor Philip Stark spent last Friday unleashing both science and technology upon a recent California election. He wanted to answer a very simple question—had the vote counting produced the proper result?—and he had developed a stats-based system to find out.”

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