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  • From: "S B" <merlin180 AT hotmail.com>
  • To: "Internetworkers: http://www.ibiblio.org/internetworkers/" <internetworkers AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [internetworkers] Are You Registered To Vote At YourCurrentAddress? Register Online!
  • Date: Wed, 6 Aug 2008 14:10:30 -0400

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.
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