RE: Contract: need Hart support for random sampling

["alkolwicz" <alkolwicz@xxxxxxxxx>]

Yes, I am referring to the Dupe board and also the absentee ballot
qualification process and the voter registration process, and the
provisional ballot process and the ballot issuance process (especially in
early and absentee situations).

All of these areas contribute in major ways to the accuracy of the election
result.

Al

-----Original Message-----
From: Paul Walmsley [mailto:paul@xxxxxxxxxxx] 
Sent: Tuesday, April 27, 2004 10:29 AM
To: alkolwicz
Cc: Citizens for Verifiable Voting
Subject: RE: Contract: need Hart support for random sampling

On Tue, 27 Apr 2004, alkolwicz wrote:

> Paul,
> 
> Will you take the lead to ensure that the sampling process is not limited
to
> "checking the addition" of the wrong set of votes?  
> 
> Equally important to be sampled are the qualification of ballots and the
> interpretation of votes.
> 
> 1.  Eligible ballots go uncounted, and ineligible ballots get counted. 
> 
> 2.  The interpretation of what constitutes a vote is not reliable.  As I
> understood the Hart system, only those ballots that WERE initially
rejected
> by the equipment will be reevaluated for a recount.
> 
> I am available to discuss further.

Hi Al,

there are many open issues with the stat sample hand count at this point
that will need to be resolved in the upcoming weeks.  in general, I would
encourage everyone who is interested in this issue to pay attention to it
by reading the memos, watching the recent County Commissioners meeting
recordings, etc.  

I would hope that any formal proposals for stat sampling would be posted
to the cvv-discuss list.  most of the discussion so far has been informal 
and mostly focused on figuring out ways to get the state to approve the 
general process.

I can say, regarding your point #2 above, that merely hand-counting a 
sample of the residual ballots would be unacceptable.  If the point 
of doing the statistically-significant sample hand count is to verify that 
the counting machines are counting ballots correctly, we'd need to count 
plenty of non-residual ballots also.  Perhaps you are referring to the dup 
board process for the residual ballots?


- Paul