RE: Rock and a hard place

["Paul Tiger" <tigerp@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Paper scanning is being pursued. It is part and parcel of the RFP. Every
vendor was supposed to present a paper scanning method in addition to DREs.
Most did, while some did not. Some even claimed that it was not on the RFP
(so much for their reading skills). Many have said things like, "Well that's
not a HAVA requirement.", In regards to things that they didn't want to or
could not address. That's how some of them got eliminated.

BC needs to have paper scanning systems for the simplest reason - mail-in
balloting. Mail-in balloting does not mean county-wide mail-ins, but
absentee ballots. Absentee ballots will always exist, and paper scanned
ballots are the only way to achieve them. That is why BC demanded a need for
them in the RFP.

As for the cost of the DREs or any of the system components, this was
intentionally withheld from the committee, and with good reason. The reason
is that the commissioners want the committee to base its advisement on
practical use, not price.
I believe that was a good move, because some of our committee members would
choke if they knew what the costs were. A good number of the committee
members hail from non-profits that can't rub two nickels together. Telling
them the costs would make them puke.

Paul Tiger

-----Original Message-----
From: Christian Rudolph [mailto:reindeer@xxxxxxxxxx]
Sent: Monday, October 20, 2003 11:25 PM
To: Bollinger; Boulder County Voting Email List
Subject: Re: Rock and a hard place

JC,

I agree with your comments here.
I also wonder, along with others, why it is that optical scanning has
not been pursued more vigorously, as it is a well known and more secure
technology that could easily be made handicapped/disabled accessible.

Hart/Intercivic's presentation displayed a reasonable way of doing this,
using bar codes to show proof of the vote, with a paper ballot that
could be easily, accurately and quickly machine counted if a recount
were required.
The fear of an electronic recount freaks us all out, I think.
A paper recount, even if done by machine, would be more secure and
reliable, in my opinion.
Optical bar code readers could be easily made to also have
text-to-speech capability such that a vote could be independently
verified by the voter.
This would allow off the shelf bar code scanners to be modified for use
in voting, which would prevent vote tampering on a wide scale.
I also think that it would reduce the cost to Boulder County.

My guess is that certain companies have lobbied for DREs, and therefore
have convinced legislators that DREs are the way to go.
Legislators are not technologists, so not much convincing is required.
I suspect that the cost to Boulder County will be high for any of the
DREs that we saw presented.
Does anyone know what price tags are attached to them?
Does anyone have verification of this idea, or is this just my
suspicion?

-Christian Rudolph

On Sun, 2003-10-19 at 21:54, Bollinger wrote:
> 1.  I concur with Kellen & others that we MUST have a voter verifiable
> paper ballot.  The Diebold machine controversy in the Georgia governor
> election recently should amply exemplify the problem of not being able
> to truly verify a contested close election.    (Reference,for example,
> which you've probably already seen:
> http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,60563,00.html   )
> As mentioned earlier, some machines, such as Hart Interactive, can
> provide a printed receipt of each voter's ballot, which the voter can
> verify thru a window, (where a 2D barcode code also be added adjacent
> to the ballot receipt). This might be quite sufficient.
>
> 2.  If we go with scanners (or DRE), then there must be guarantees by
> the manufacturer that the machine can handle all main types of future
> applications, such as Ranked Voting, for an agreed-upon & affordable
> price, where it could be installed in the future.  Thus the scanners
> would have to produce a digital Ballot Image of each voter's record, I
> believe.
>
> 3.  Can these Scanners give warning about under-votes and prevent
> over-votes?