Election fraud without fraud

In this election we've seen a number of cases where it would appear that Democrats continue to vote for days after the election is over.  There are a number of examples of close elections where large, 18000, vote leads by Republicans are erased days after the election was over for example.

While the most obvious answer given the Democrat history of voter fraud, Mayor Daley of Chicago anyone?, is that the Democrats are manufacturing ballots or counting invalid ones there is another possible answer which doesn't actually involve manufacturing ballots.

If we assume that random counting errors are on par with the difference in votes between the candidates in a close election Democrats could manufacture a win for their candidate simply by recounting all or some ballots until they win.

For example if two candidates differ by 250 votes and the errors in counting ballots are around 300 votes then if the ballots were recounted 1000 times each candidate would win around 500 times.  That's because if the errors are random, i.e. the favor the Republican as often as they favor the Democrat, about 1/2 the time the Republican will benefit and 1/2 the time the Democrat will benefit.

What this means is that if the Republican wins the first count there's a 50/50 chance the Democrat will win the recount.

What this shows is that recounting can be used for effective fraud. If the difference between the count and the recount is simply random human errors the first count is as good as the recount and there is no reason to pick the recount result over the first count.

However what the Democrats do is continue counting until their candidate wins and then declare an end to counting.  If they didn't declare an end to counting the Republican could win the recount of the recount which would not be in the interests of the Democrats.

That's fraud in the case where the difference between the counts is solely due to random error since in that case declaring that no count is good until a Democrat wins is guaranteeing a Democrat win since eventually the random errors will align for the Democrat.

What this means is that unless it can be shown that ballots were missed or illegally rejected the first count should be accepted no matter who wins.  Otherwise Democrats will continue to be able to manufacture wins in close election by recounting until they benefit from random counting errors.