Elections (and banks) are error prone

The northwest blogs Also Also, On the Road to 2008, and HorsesAss.org are making a point about the comparison between the error rates in online banking and elections. Here's the introduction from Daniel Kirkdorffer at On the Road to 2008:

There has been a considerably amount of brouhaha over assertions made yesterday by King County Executive Ron Sims that "we had an accuracy rate that any bank would envy.". His comment was based on an error rate of 0.2%, and was received by detractors as a laughable statement.

(Just to be clear, those "detractors" included right-wing blogger Stefan Sharkansky and a friend of his from Shoreline.)

So all three blogs go on to talk about the fact that there are indeed errors in banking, just as there are errors in elections.

During a "discussion" at the Sound Politics blog, a comment was left by Norm pointing to an article from August 2004 at Bank Technology News, entitled On-line Billing: Customer Literacy, Software Cut Errors, which includes the following:

According to TowerGroup, about 36 million U.S. households-about one third of the total number-will pay bills on-line in 2004. Errors will account for about 0.2 percent of those 1.7 billion on-line transactions. "There is always going to be an error rate that they have to live with," notes Beth Robertson, senior analyst at TowerGroup. But she says rates are remarkably low and roughly half of what they were in 2001.

Online banking, like elections, isn't a perfect process. There's always going to be a small error rate. We conduct elections and banking to the best of our ability. We don't invalidate them simply because there were a few errors. Dino Rossi and the GOP have blown the election way out of proportion and are decieving the public into thinking there was massive fraud.