Song Ci stressed the importance of proper coroner's conduct during autopsies and the accurate recording of the inquest of each autopsy by official clerks.
He wrote of examinations of victims' bodies performed in the open amongst official clerks and attendants, a coroner's assistant (or midwife in the case of women), actual accused suspect of the crime and relatives of the deceased, with the results of the autopsy called out loud to the group and noted in the inquest report.
The historian Richard Andrews has argued persuasively that the sans-culotte leadership came largely from a lower middle class of minor officials, clerks and prosperous tradesmen, but Hazan (who seems unfamiliar with English-language scholarship on the revolution) accepts their own self-description as men who worked with their hands, and for the most part lived on the edge of poverty.
There is an official, the clerk, but the responsibility of the clerk is not to preside in a parliamentary manner but rather to feel for a "sense of the meeting," which draws together the thinking of the meeting to the point of action.
According to county officials, one clerk had mistakenly not counted some 1,100 absentee ballots on election night, while another clerk had counted about 400 ballots twice.
Official coding clerks register the diagnosis and injury mechanism of all hospital admissions, based on data obtained from medical records.
The Telegraph, Independent, and Sun all splashed on the story, which was attributed to "Indian officials" (railway clerks perhaps?) or "security sources".
"Steps need to be taken in order to ensure that every American's right to vote is protected," said Ernest Hawkins, co-chairman of the panel and the president of the Association of County Recorders, Election Officials and Clerks.
It sometimes feels like Britons live in a straitjacket of health and safety rules, monitored by petty officials, shop clerks and bureaucrats whose standard response to many everyday activities is "you can't do that – health and safety!" This wouldn't matter in a country like France or Italy, where rules are made to be broken.
If the officials and clerks suffer for their crimes, that is a minor matter.
