Auditing an election of, say, 3M voters where one candidate allegedly beat the other 50.5% to 46.5% to 3% for minor candidates need only determine that there's less than a 5% chance that the true election result had the winning candidate with 50%+1 votes to avoid a runoff. With a paper ballot satisfying #1 and #2 and generally accepted statistical analysis, this won't require a recount of nearly the entire pool of votes, only a random sample from each ballot box sufficiently large to rule out the need for a runoff.

If on the other hand the alleged winning amount was exactly 1,500,001 out of 3M votes, or if it was 1,499,499 and the winner wanted a recount to avoid a runoff, a full manual recount would likely be necessary.

so EVERY bad guy, including would-be bad guys, already know this? do you know it? how about you post it as an anonymous response to this comment.... i mean, it's everywhere, right?

To increase the pressure on Google, the telecoms groups are interested in finding common cause with content owners such as media companies, which get little or no money from the technology company when it aggregates their content on Google News.