RE: testing DREs - what a mess

["Paul Tiger" <tigerp@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I think that Neal's got the plan here that would work. Doing a hand count
for the purposes of checking the veracity of a machine, but not actually
tallying hand counted ballots for the official total seems legal.

Looks like Linda thinks so too. We should run this by Drew or Brian and see
what the SoS thinks.

This harks back to my thoughts about Plan B, in case the commissioners do
decide to buy DREs for 2004 - we need to come up with ways to prove or
disprove the veracity of a DRE. And of course any ballot scanners.

Paul Tiger

-----Original Message-----
From: Neal McBurnett [mailto:neal@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx]
Sent: Wednesday, December 03, 2003 10:08 PM
To: bcv
Subject: Re: testing DREs - what a mess

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?