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Re: How can Neal say Boulder's election was accurate


"Never attribute to malice that which can be equally explained by stupidity." (or something like that)

That said, here's another bone I've got to pick and just wait 'til you see my whole list:

According to one of the paper's stories I read, the printing bill for the ballots was $143,000. If we had 150K voters, and some substantial number of those did early voting out of the laser printer (or were those sheets from the specially pre-printed unreadable stock, too?), then did we spend about a buck a ballot or more? This system is not only barely usable (and arguably not even that), despite using off the shelf scanners it also runs on some ridiculously super premium stock that is more than twice the $0.40 Donetta estimated a ballot to cost, and if you get even one tiny detail wrong, it doesn't work at all? Great, just great. Thanks for violating the Colorado Constitution to make up for the system's glaring shortcomings and then screwing even that up.

<tongue-in-cheek>How about we go back to verbal voting in front of election judges with a fully public hand marked tally sheet, at least then you better be willing to stand by your vote -- the ultimate in voter verification for voters of diverse abilities -- and after all, our ballots aren't secret anymore anyway.</tongue-out>

Also, does anybody know anything about the "pre-printed ballots" that were supposedly used in Weld county that apparently also may have had serial numbers as well as the voter's names on them?

And another thing, what was the outcome of the Commissioner's hearing today? Sorry I couldn't attend on such short notice, I'll be glad to make sure whoever is on that committee gets my detailed list.

I vote by e-mail for hand counting, especially if the ballot is simpler (a la next year's City election). I'm probably still able to be convinced that someone other than Boulder County's elections office should be allowed to use a paper ballot scanning system (and Caltech/MIT seem to think the precinct scanners are a good choice if I recall correctly), but then only with a "statistically significant" sample of the ballots cross-checked by another means, presumably hand counting.

Joe

PS - tis the season for CVV to reconvene?


On Nov 10, 2004, at 10:03 AM, Ralph Shnelvar wrote:

Dear Evan:

On Wed, 10 Nov 2004 09:27:48 -0700 (MST), you wrote:


So, they can be paid $1, to make it legal. Parties charge each other
$1 all the time for rent or whatever. I don't know what the legal
name is for this kind of thing.

I believe it is called "minimal consideration."

Obscure piece of trivia. By common law, the "least consideration" that one
person can give another is a peppercorn.

The point of all of this is that for a contract to be valid something of
value ("consideration") has to be exchanged. In the U.S. we exchange a
dollar because peppercorns are hard to find.

Ralph


Evan

On Tue, 9 Nov 2004, Some Guy wrote:

There is no *free*. The volunteers get paid $10 an hour. The polling judges
were getting $150 per day.
The clerk has to pay them to make them employees otherwise they can't
legally make them dance to the tune.

But it sure as hell isn't going to cost $1.3M.


-----Original Message-----
From: Evan Daniel Ravitz [mailto:evan@xxxxxxxx]
Sent: Monday, November 08, 2004 7:01 PM
To: kellen carey
Cc: cvv-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: RE: How can Neal say Boulder's election was accurate


You're forgetting, Kell, that people here in Boulder care enough
about elections that we got 130+ people in less than 3 days to
volunteer over 1000 hours to count.

IF the county asked for vounteers in our utility bills, we'd have
thousands to count for free.

We employ election officials to do the research and the math.

I suggest we don't exhaust ourselves on the details but decide what
we want, learn how to say it simply so everyone will agree with us,
and then get citizens to join us in asking for it.

"If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well
enough." -Einstein

Evan



On Mon, 8 Nov 2004, kellen carey wrote:

Evan,

Do you know how many different races people typically
vote on in one election in other countries?  Most
(nearly all, if my comparative politics isn't too
dated) European countries don't vote on amendments,
initiatives, referendums, recalls, judges, etc. in
elections.

Just a reminder: it took three election judges about
5+ hours to count only 597 ballots with only three
races in the Spring 2004 Nederland election.  There
were about 25-30 different contests in this Boulder
County 2004 election, with some 150,000+ voters.  I'll
let others do the math.

I'm certainly not saying we shouldn't handcount, given
the obvious transparency, verifiability, and accuracy
advantages.

But it would be nice to hear a definitive answer on
this question from other countries.

kell

--- Evan Daniel Ravitz <evan@xxxxxxxx> wrote:


On Mon, 8 Nov 2004, Some Guy wrote:

For the length of time that it took to count the
vote, it could have been
done by hand in each precinct. 

I believe countries that do it by hand do it in
precincts -in hours,
not days.

What we have is the kluge of kluges: Illegally
tested (thanks for
trying, Al) proprietary software running on Windows,
intersecting
with the vaguaries of printing, and the greatest
motive in history:
the Presidency.

If humans see imperfect boxes we have no problem
compensating.

But instead of hand-counting which is cheaper
($1.82/vote in Canada
compared to $3-6 here) more accurate (according to
MIT/Caltech),
done in public (poll watchers watching) with the $
going to humans
not software corps, we will get a very sophistocated
expensive
way of making the boxes better, kluged on top of the
pile of shit
we're now buying.

Poll watchers THINK they're watching now, but
they're staring at
"black boxes."

Evan








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