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The problem mentioned in the Gideon report is completely soluble
or at least identifiable if “auto-resolve damaged contest” is not
used. In Eagle County we “auto-resolve undervotes”
only. It seems that “auto resolve undervotes” is relatively
harmless, if not completely so. The experience we have is that if any
mark however light is found within the target the BNIP software detects either
a vote or an overvote, and if there is any damage to the existing ballot target
(occlusion of the target rectangle), manual resolution of a “damaged
contest” is required. It is almost impossible for a foreign
particle or something causing a white line to produce an undervote, unless “autoresolve
damaged contest” is selected. One would have to imagine a particle
of precise size and placement to occlude the entire voter mark without touching
the surrounding rectangle. I would therefore recommend to operate
with auto-resolve undervote selected (only). Having turned off
auto-resolution of undervotes, the manual resolution of undervotes would be
extremely time consuming and would not produce any differences due to human
recognized voter intent. We have actually tried this in Eagle County in
the early scanning of our mail-in ballots and have come to that conclusion. On the other hand, if foreign particles, smudges or other
spurious marks are causing extraneous marks on the scanned images of the
ballots which are being recognized as votes, the solution would be a real hand
eye scan of each contest which is actually resolved as a vote- i.e. in Hart, a
contest which is not marked with a colored overlay at all- and this of course
is generally the majority of all contests on all the ballot images. There
is no way to select for slightly marked, or less than fully marked targets
within the Hart system as far as I know. This is the function that would
be required to help find the effect of spurious marks. Also of course,
the “none of the above” option as a choice on the ballot would
greatly help in finding spurious marks- without this the system is depending on
the likelihood that an overvote will be generated to find that such a problem
exists. If you know the problem already exists and is significant, then
effectively, each contest must be hand counted… although it may be
convenient to use the optically scanned version of the ballot to conduct this
hand count and to use the hart resolution software interface to reflect and
record the observed voter intent. Having now experienced the resolution process first hand, I can
say that there are some very interesting patterns of mis-voting which arise,
and spurious marks certainly do create overvote situations. No doubt
then, the same effects will cause voter undervoted contests to mistakenly
become recognized as voted. Harvie Branscomb Eagle County Canvass Board From: Margit Johansson
[mailto:margitjo@xxxxxxxxx] So why is Boulder County having problems three years later? (Gideon spoke with someone from the Camera, so maybe there
will be more on this in the paper.) Margit Margit Johansson 303-442-1668/ margitjo@xxxxxxxxx On Wed, Nov 5, 2008 at 11:07 AM, John Gideon <jgideon@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx <mailto:jgideon@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>>
wrote: Boulder Co is suffering from paper dust and dirt from the
ballots. All it takes is a can of pressurized air to fix the problem. |