[internetworkers] Are You Registered To Vote At YourCurrentAddress? Register Online!

S B merlin180 at hotmail.com
Wed Aug 6 14:10:30 EDT 2008


Hi Tanner

>>> That's one of the reasons I really like the optical scan ballots that 
>>> they use in Durham County.
Actually, now that you mentioned it, there are several things about the 
initial physical process I've often wondered about - maybe you can educate 
me......

Assuming Durham's process is the same:
    The reading machines look like giant shredders - an unfortunate 
co-incidence :)
    The ballot page itself is a series of small roundish boxes that the 
voter fills in to indicate their intent
    The ballot is placed in the reader, which whirs for a bit, increments a 
counter on the front, and drops the ballot into the hopper
    The voter collects their 'I voted' sticker and leaves

The counter appears to indicate a ballot was received but beyond that,  what 
checks are in place to ensure that  the machine:

    - read a *valid* ballot (would it spit it back out if it detected 
something inconsistent like 2 votes where there should only be one ?)

    - correctly interpreted the voter's intent ? - AFAIK the voter gets no 
feedback as to what the machine 'saw' on the page - maybe a bent ballot or 
something else caused a misread

    - increments the correct totals ? (e.g. something like open kimono code 
inspections)

    - Ditto the downstream hardware/software


The random manual recounts you mention might catch some issues - at least 
for the machines that were recounted:

    What percentage of ballots/machines/stations/districts are  randomly 
recounted, and how random is it. ?

    Do such recounts ever *exactly* match the machine numbers ?

    What happens if random recount indicates a "significant" disparity with 
the machine totals - does the recount widen ?

Tia

Simon...

--------------------------------------------------
From: "Tanner Lovelace" <clubjuggler at gmail.com>
Sent: Tuesday, August 05, 2008 2:02 PM
To: "Internetworkers: http://www.ibiblio.org/internetworkers/" 
<internetworkers at lists.ibiblio.org>
Subject: Re: [internetworkers] Are You Registered To Vote At 
YourCurrentAddress? Register Online!

> On Tue, Aug 5, 2008 at 12:17 PM, David Minton <dminton at mindspring.com> 
> wrote:
>> While not intentional, there was that very public "oops" in NC in 2004 
>> for
>> which votes were not "counted accurately:"
>>
>> "More than 4,500 North Carolina votes lost because of mistake in voting
>> machine capacity"
>>
>> <http://www.usatoday.com/news/politicselections/vote2004/2004-11-04-votes-lo
>> st_x.htm>
>>
>> If I recall, at least one state-wide office was decided by a few hundred
>> votes, and might have had a different outcome if those votes had not been
>> lost.
>>
>> David
>
> Excellent point, David!  And, one that I had actually forgotten about.
> One good thing, though, that came out of this debacle was that it
> really drove home the point that paperless balloting systems are
> just problems waiting to happen.  That's one of the reasons I really like
> the optical scan ballots that they use in Durham County.  An error like
> that simply couldn't happen because if it did you'd just go back to the
> original ballots and count them by hand.
>
> Cheers,
> Tanner
>
> -- 
> Tanner Lovelace
> http://wtl.wayfarer.org/
> (fieldless) In fess two roundels in pale, a billet fesswise and an
> increscent, all sable.
> ---
> Come and play at the InterNetWorkers Web site! 
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