Well the EU referendum happened in the UK and there was some talk about what happens if the result is a tie, or if it is very close. Apparently, there would not be a recount unless there was a specific problem with the counting in one area. I am not interested in the legal questions of what happens if the result is close. The person who has the largest number of declared votes wins. That's how it works.
What I am interested in whether anyone has estimated the error on the final results? When people count up all the votes, they make accidental mistakes. If you counted all the votes ten times you would likely get ten different numbers which is why people do recounts to check that the result is correct.
Has anyone ever looked at data from recounts in previous elections, either in the UK or elsewhere, to estimate the sort of standard deviation that we can expect. If you do two recounts and the results differ by a hundred votes in ten thousand, is this statistically significant or is it within the expected error from human counting?
I hope the question is clear now. Please ask if it is not.