Manual tally audit identifies uncounted vote

[Neal McBurnett <neal@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Today there was a manual tally (hand count) of a small sample of
ballots to audit the results of the Hart InterCivic BallotNow vote
counting system during the recount of the St. Vrain School District
Ballot Issue 3a race.  The sample was apparently chosen last Friday
afternoon by grabbing some of the few batches that had not yet been
scanned.

The count was off by one.  The manual tally for batch "C126" was
47 "yes", 49 "no", and 1 "undervote".  But the BallotNow count was
47 "yes", 48 "no", and 2 "undervote".  For the other two batches,
the manual tally matched the BallotNow tally.  A total of 287 ballots
were tallied manually.

Subsequent investigation identified a vote in precinct 4171107002 on
ballot 656372 which was clearly marked on the ballot as a "No" vote
(the box was completely filled in), but was recorded via BallotNow as
an undervote (as if the voter had voted neither yes nor no).
The BallotNow audit log noted an "Auto Resolve UnderVote" for
the St. Vrain race on that ballot, along with "Autoresolve damaged
contest".

The barcodes on the 4 pages of this particular ballot were
significantly different in length.  E.g. the barcode of the serial
number ranged from 41 mm to 43.5 mm long.  BallotNow uses the bar
codes to help it locate where the boxes are on the ballot, and it
identified this ballot as "damaged".  The ballot was rescanned as a
new batch of 1, and brought up on the screen for resolution.  The St
Vrain race was highlighted as "damaged".  When the race was popped up
in its own window (a narrow window, as usual), the title of the window
read "Unresolved dama", i.e. the whole title wasn't visible.  Opening
the window up wider revealed the whole title which said "Unresolved
damaged undervoted contest".

So before manual intervention, BallotNow had identified the race as
needing resolution, but incorrectly interpreted it by default as an
undervote.

Next came the human resolution process.  Interpreting the audit log is
difficult.  There are two theories for how the race could have been
resolved as an undervote.

One theory is that the ballot was simply not shown to the resolution
judges.  During the recount, the teams were only resolving the St
Vrain race, and the normal user interface cues were less helpful than
normal in helping the team identify all races needing resolution.
Next, a subsequent "autoresolve" process preserved the mistaken,
automatic "undervote" interpretation.

Another theory is that since the user interface is confusing, and the
word "undervoted" in the title bar may not have been visible, the
resolution team may have seen the clear "No" vote and clicked on
"confirm".  In this case that would place the text "Confirm User" over
both the yes and no boxes, which again is confusing, and a hint that
the system is about to confirm both votes as absent, but not all
resolution teams fully understood the hints that the system provides.


The BallotNow recount has gone thru all the ballots, but the final
tally has not been released yet.  The Canvass board, which is running
the recount, has not yet met to consider this evidence.

This is a rare opportunity to not only get a more accurate result for
this race, but to gain crucial data and experience to allow us to
improve future elections in Boulder County and elsewhere.

The Secretary of State rules for a recount with BallotNow say the
manual resolutions should happen the same way during the recount
that they did during the original count.  That doesn't make sense to
me, but it is the rule.

Given the rule, I suggest to the canvass board that it makes sense to
do a comparison of the audit logs from the original count and the
recount.  That could be done by writing them out as normal pdf files,
using the Unix "pdftotext" command to convert them to text, and
processing that text to see how each ballot was resolved for this
race.  I've done this sort of thing beforoe, and it would be fairly
easy to get some good comparisons, in my experience.

I also think further manual tallies using a truly random sample would
quickly give us far better information on how often this seems to
happen.

Time is short - the official results need to be in by Thursday or
Friday.  I recommend both activities recommended above be started
tomorrow morning.

Neal McBurnett                 http://bcn.boulder.co.us/~neal/
Signed and/or sealed mail encouraged.  GPG/PGP Keyid: 2C9EBA60