Re: testing DREs - what a mess

[Evan Daniel Ravitz <evan@xxxxxxxx>]

It's certainly better than no hand-count. But it's illegal under
state and federal law. One or the the other, now.

Evan

On Wed, 3 Dec 2003, Paul Walmsley wrote:

> On Wed, 3 Dec 2003, Evan Daniel Ravitz wrote:
>
> > On Wed, 3 Dec 2003, Neal McBurnett wrote:
> > >
> > > So this is another reason to avoid DREs and vote recording machines.
> > > With a ballot marking machine, this sort of test is far less important
> > > since the voter verifies the paper results on the spot.
> >
> > You can verify the paper reflects your votes; but you can't verify
> > that the scanner/computer combo counts them. And under the law, ONLY
> > the scanner/computer combo is allowed to count them. The paper is
> > false "verification" unless a judge ORDERS that it be counted by
> > people instead of the machine. To my knowledge this has never or
> > almost never happened in 30 years across the country.
>
> Evan,
>
> What do you think about proposals to count a statistically-significant
> percentage of the computer-scanned ballots by hand, and to compare the
> human assessment of those votes to the scanner's assessment of those
> votes?
>
>
> - Paul
>