At 11:39 AM -0600 8/25/08, Mary Eberle wrote:
Hi Margit and Everyone,
Would early
voting be a better approach than seeking more investment in machines,
especially DREs?
However, I did just hear of a situation in Indiana's
spring primary in which the voters who appeared to vote when the polls
opened in one precinct were given paper ballots to mark but could not cast
them because the scanner did not work. The second scanner was delivered, and
the poll workers could not get it to work either. Finally the voters left
without casting their ballots.
For line-phobic people, early voting
on paper ballots at the clerk's office or satellite office, where people
presumably know how to operate the machinery, seems the best bet to
me.
Mary
(303) 442-2164
Margit Johansson wrote:
Hi All,
I've
just been reading something about the interaction of voters with machines
in 2004 in one state. With a long ballot, some people with limited
English skills, and machines cancelling people's votes when they took too
long, some people took an hour on a machine.
Part of the solution to lines is to have enough machines. Another
would be to have people prepared for how they were going to vote ahead of
time. Could we get the clerks to do tests before the election, using
people who were and were not prepared, people whose English was poor,
etc?
Margit
Margit Johansson
303-442-1668/
margitjo@xxxxxxxxx <mailto:margitjo@xxxxxxxxx>
Please note that the time to buy new
machines for the November election is long past, although many states are
having fire sales on DREs.
If you are in a Colorado
county, e.g. Jefferson, that uses DREs for precinct voting I would note that
there is an easy rule-of-thumb for calculating how many machines will be
required per precinct to minimize the lines.
Most people will take roughly 10 minutes
to vote, although with the anticipated longer ballot in November many will
take somewhat longer. Thus, for a 12 hour Election Day (7 AM to 7 PM, 720
minutes) each DRE can handle a maximum of 70 votes (720 minutes
divided by 10 minutes per voter plus 20 minutes to change tapes).
In Presidential Elections turnout
averages around 60% of registered voters. So a precinct with 1,000 registered
voters needs to be prepared for 600 people to show up at the polling place.
600 voters divided by 70 votes per machine requires a minimum of
nine (9) machines for that precinct.
Murphy should also be expected to
take part in the election and of nine machines one failure should be
anticipated. So, to make it easy, for every 1,000 registered voters in a
precinct using DREs exclusively there should be 10 machines, or one(1)
DRE for every 100 registered voters in the precinct.
You might want to check on how many DREs
your county clerk has allocated for each precinct by number of registered
voters as I'll bet it is probably less than half the estimate of DREs needed
presented here. Lets see, Jefferson County has roughly 350,000 registered
voters, which suggests they need around 3,500 DREs. Anybody willing to check
on how many the county clerk actually has?
Traditionally only a small percentage of
voters use the DREs at early voting polling places. That probably will not be
enough to ease the lines at polling places on Election Day.
By now it should be obvious why
county clerks have so desperately been pushing mail ballots. Otherwise
citizens are likely to be heating up the tar, gathering chicken feathers, and
tearing down fence rails on Election Day. Come to think of it, that might not
be a bad idea anyway given that several states, e.g., California, Ohio, New
Mexico, et alia, have done away with DREs prior to this election. But thanks
to SoS Mike Coffman and John Gardner, Colorado still uses them.
For those of you who follow BradBlog
note that
Diebold/Premier (whoever they are
today) optical scanners aren't performing any better than DREs.
Chuck Corry
P.S. Watch for Coffman to tout his "election experience" if he wins the
6th Congressional District seat.
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