avanti paper

I think that you may have missed one of my postings about the Avanti paper, or maybe you did see it?

In any case, as I said last night, the printer that they use is not cast in stone. I asked them if they’d change out the printer and print a full ballot like a scannable absentee ballot. They can and they don’t see it as difficult. I don’t either.

The guts of this DRE is a Dell laptop. The printer is a parallel / centronics interface. You could stick whatever printer suits your tastes on the back end.

I don’t like the paper that they use either, and it just is not an issue. All of the other vendors are telling us (me) why its not a good idea or some other stodgy trash, rather than looking for ways to please us for the millions that we’d spend.

This is one of the reasons that Avanti keeps coming up to the top of my stack. They don’t see walls where there are doors.

Now we have to see how they will respond to source code examination.

Paul Tiger

-----Original Message-----
From: kellen carey [mailto:kcarey636@xxxxxxxxx]
Sent: Wednesday, November 12, 2003 11:37 PM
To: BCV
Subject: RE: letter to the editor, 11/11

Paul,

You're sorta right: Avanti is the only vender who showed us an already operating and functioning voter verifiable paper ballot. But it falls short in a few important respects:

1) Paper is spooled -- meaning any handcount would be extremely problematic because each separate ballot would have to be cut/separated from ajoining ballots.

2) Paper is about as flimsy as the cheap toilet paper used in gas station bathrooms, meaning it won't handle much handling by hand counters.

3) Ink deteriorates rather rapidly (either due to the paper type or the ink or both).

4) What it prints out isn't the complete context of the ballot, only what you voted for or against. That is, it just says "County Issue For" and "Sherriff Jones" w/o the other options in context.

5) The print is so dang small you have to have a magnifying glass to read it. Not a terrible thing, since Avanti actually supplies a magnifying glass. But imagine several hundred hand counters with several hundred magnifying glasses. Do-able but, really, can't we do better?

6) As long as Colorado disallows recounts by any method other than the the original tabulation method, the Avanti spooled paper ballot is utter useless -- except maybe ass (pardon the pun) toilet paper.

kell

Paul Tiger <tigerp@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

It appears to me that Avante has the upper hand. They do produce a paper
ballot, and it can be the primary ballot method. Their system puts a 2D
(blocked bar code) at the top of each ballot, and that can be read by any
scanner, not just theirs. They can also be hand counted, because they print
out the voters selection.

Avante is the only vendor that can do this without modifications to their
system. Everyone else would have to re-write software and add on new
hardware.

Paul Tiger

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