Confidence in the precisions of accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS) and decay measurements must be comparable for the application of the radiocarbon calibration to age determinations using both technologies. We confirmed the random nature of the temporal distribution of 14C ions in an AMS spectrometer for a number of sample counting rates and properties of the sputtering process. The temporal distribution of ion counts was also measured to confirm the applicability of traditional counting statistics. © 2004 by the Arizona Board of Regents on behalf of the University of Arizona.