If there are s strata, we would ideally take all 2s ways of choosing the half-stratum; but if s is large, this may be infeasible.
Let H be a Hadamard matrix of size s, and choose one row per half-sample.
The orthogonality of rows of H ensures that our choices are uncorrelated between half-samples.
Then our estimate for the sampling variance of the statistic is the average of (ai − a)2.
This is (at least in the ideal case) an unbiased estimate of the sampling variance.