Re: testing DREs - what a mess

[Neal McBurnett <neal@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, Dec 03, 2003 at 09:51:36PM -0700, Evan Daniel Ravitz wrote:
> It's certainly better than no hand-count. But it's illegal under
> state and federal law. One or the the other, now.

I see this as a verification issue, not a different method of counting
(which violates the law).

Linda Salas seemed to think it would be ok.

If the hand count were to repeatedly come up with a different answer
than the machine on the random sample, I would expect that we would
get the machine fixed, and when it was fixed, we would use its
[corrected] results which would then be identical with the hand-count
results.

At the least, I would expect that a demonstration that the machines
were miscounting would get the secretary of state to use her authority
to order a count via a more accurate method (another machine, or hand
counting).

Or, even better, lead to a national outcry and investigation....

-Neal

> On Wed, 3 Dec 2003, Paul Walmsley wrote:

> > 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?