Excerpt from article reproduced
in full at bottom of email (referring to Boulder County vote counting delays)
To ensure accuracy, election
workers are visually checking a picture of each ballot on computers, searching
for the troublesome dust line. Though officials hope a couple of technological
fixes will speed up the counting, the rate of votes counted Wednesday hung around 1,200 ballots an hour.
“Accuracy is more
important than speed,” said Boulder County Clerk and Recorder Hillary
Hall. “People expect accuracy — this is the job I was elected to
do.”
The molasses speed of the
counting process is frustrating Hall, but perhaps more confounding is that
there doesn’t appear to be any obvious explanation for why the paper-dust
problem showed up now.
“I just don’t
know,” she said. “If this is a common problem, I’ve frankly
never heard about it.”
The Laura Snider article is quite reasonable in its coverage of
the Boulder vote counting process.
Why hasn’t Boulder County Clerk Hillary Hall heard about
dust problems on her Hart Scanners? I would suggest that the reason is
that there is no mechanism for this kind of problem sharing to take
place. The manufacturer has little motivation to encourage the sharing of
election problems with their equipment… the CCCI (clerks association)
doesn’t either, apparently, other than what happens through
serendipity. The state has no mechanism for this and the election quality
advocates among the public are largely shut out of the process so have
difficulty learning about these problems, and also have problems having their
criticisms heard once they do have information.
Eagle County has encountered a number of similar problems with
Hart and Kodak systems, and has been very frustrated by the operation of this
system during the past few days. Will the reports of this frustration reach
other counties and other states? Probably not.
“The county needs to talk to
their printer,” said Peter Lichtenheld, director of marketing for Hart
InterCivic. “Hart did not print the ballots ... and the printer did not
use Hart secure ballot stock.”
Unlike Boulder, Eagle County has its ballots manufactured by
Hart. These ballots are also problematic but in a different way.
They do not seem to be emitting dust particles, but they are showing evidence
shadow imprinting of portions of the ballot onto other portions. In our case,
fortunately, this is occurring only on the removable stub… but in past
elections we have experienced transfer of ballot toner onto the active part of
the ballot (on Diebold printed ballots in the past).
In addition, Hart created (I do not think these are actually,
technically, “printed”) ballots are folded at the
factory. These multiple folds are very difficult to straighten out and
have caused immense difficulty in feeding the ballots into the scanners.
On many batches there are one or more ballots which fail to scan and therefore
have to be deleted from the digital records and rescanned in an adjacent batch.
(Alternatively the batch must be sequentially rescanned until successful, but
this proves to be too slow). In another area, the score at the top of
each page which allows the stub to be removed is too weak and hence the stub is
extremely difficult to remove, also delaying the scanning process and often
leaving a rough edge at the top of the ballot.
Eagle County is stopping to dismantle parts from the scanners and
vacuum the interior on a very frequent basis. During the tests it was
found that the scanner needed extra white metal shields to be added to
successfully scan 17” ballots. This information had not been
provided in advance by Hart.
It was also discovered that inserting ballots bottom first
caused an extra load on the ballot processing software, actually slowing the
process and causing it to run out of memory, frequently. When it ran out of
memory the program would not recover gracefully. This actually
caused certain batches of ballots to consistently fail to scan.
When all ballots were loaded head first, this problem was relieved (apparently
for technical reasons related to the design of the software, but probably never
encountered during State testing and in any case unknown to Hart system
users). However it was then discovered that since the first fold was
about ¾ of an inch from the top, the ballots were bent in a direction which, if
inserted top up, would not allow the scanner roller to pick up the pages
consistently. It was deemed necessary to load the ballots bottom
up. None of this was advised by Hart, the voting system supplier, in
advance and was all discovered in the initial scanning process of this
particular ballot in this election.
Will reports of these problems reach Hart and other Hart county
users? Will someone make a huge manual of gotchas which will benefit local
election officials?
Doubtful.
The remaining references to attention to detail in this article
are admirable.. I note that John Gideon’s 2005 report of the white line
is probably not entirely what Boulder County is experiencing although it
may be part of it. I suspect that there are a variety of single pixel or
larger black marks on the ballots as well. It would be better if the press were
able to get sufficient access to be able to report accurately on this topic.
Harvie Branscomb
Eagle County Canvass Board
(Eagle is a user of a similar system to that used in Boulder
County)
Boulder
County’s counting crawls
Explanation for
‘paper dust’ still elusive
Photo by Marty Caivano
Bunny Pfau carries a
loudspeaker out to a waiting car as members of the Boulder County Democrats clean
up after a party Tuesday night.
A full day after polls closed
— and long after Barack Obama claimed victory in the presidential race
— fewer than half the ballots cast in Boulder County had been counted,
earning the county the dubious distinction of being the slowest vote counter in
the state.
If the current counting pace
continues around-the-clock, county residents won’t see final results
until late Saturday.
The devil, it seems, is in the
dust. Election officials believe that tiny particles of paper dust are sticking
to the lens on the scanner, creating a vertical line running down the ballot.
When the line passes through an empty box, the computer may count a false vote.
To ensure accuracy, election
workers are visually checking a picture of each ballot on computers, searching
for the troublesome dust line. Though officials hope a couple of technological
fixes will speed up the counting, the rate of votes counted Wednesday hung around 1,200 ballots an hour.
“Accuracy is more
important than speed,” said Boulder County Clerk and Recorder Hillary
Hall. “People expect accuracy — this is the job I was elected to
do.”
The molasses speed of the
counting process is frustrating Hall, but perhaps more confounding is that
there doesn’t appear to be any obvious explanation for why the paper-dust
problem showed up now.
“I just don’t
know,” she said. “If this is a common problem, I’ve frankly
never heard about it.”
Looking
for the changed variable
The vast majority of ballots in
Boulder County are paper, and the votes are counted by a Kodak optical scanner
running software provided by Hart InterCivic.
This year, Hall ran elections
using the same machines scanning the same ballots provided by the same vendors
— Integrated Voting Solutions — in both the Longmont mail-in
election and the primaries without incident. Before ballots were sent out for
the general election, Hall’s team ran 10,000 test ballots through the
system, again without any dust problems.
Because officials think the
dust is linked to the paper, some election workers speculate that the paper
vendor must have changed something — perhaps the stock, the ink or the
printing presses.
“There were no changes in
the paper. We used identical machines, the same personnel and even the same
facility,” said Frank Kaplan, election services manager for Integrated
Voting Solutions.
Kaplan’s company printed
more than 4 million ballots for November’s election, and he has not
received any other dust complaints. He said it could have something to do with
Hart’s system.
But Hart just pointed the
finger back in the direction it came.
“The county needs to talk
to their printer,” said Peter Lichtenheld, director of marketing for Hart
InterCivic. “Hart did not print the ballots ... and the printer did not
use Hart secure ballot stock.”
User
error?
Even if there are no physical
differences in the equipment or the paper, this election differs in size. In
the primary, nearly 36,000 ballots were counted, but the total number of
ballots for this election is likely closer to 170,000, putting extra strain on
the system.
“Think of it like the
Xerox copy machine in your office,” said John Gideon, co-director of
VotersUnite!, a non-partisan group that keeps track of voting machine errors
across the country. “Usually someone comes by once a month, opens it and
cleans it out. The static electricity causes the dust on the paper to get in
there and gum everything up.”
When running a massive number
of ballots through a scanner, the same principle holds, he said, only
it’s accelerated. Someone needs to be in there cleaning out the dust as a
regular part of the process.
Computer scientists Dan
Wallach, from Rice University, and Douglas Jones, from the University of Iowa,
agree that it’s pretty routine maintenance to stop during the
ballot-counting process and deal with dust. Both scientists work with ACCURATE,
a project funded by the National Science Foundation to study electronic voting
systems.
“Dust in optical scan
systems is a known problem,” Jones said. “When I was observing
pre-election testing in Miami, (scanner) technicians had cans of compressed
air, and they blew out the scanners every 200 ballots. ... The problem should
be anticipated.”
Pickier
than most
Some problems with the Hart
scanners were anticipated. Last winter, Secretary of State Mike Coffman
de-certified all Hart scanning equipment because the scanners “failed to
count votes accurately when there are extraneous marks on the ballot.”
Coffman acknowledged that when
a stray mark caused an over-vote, meaning more than one box was counted, the
system alerted a human to look at the ballot. But when the stray mark caused a
race that had not been voted on at all to look like the voter made a choice,
the machine would not flag it as a problem. The same is true with the dust
lines.
Coffman’s testing board
recommended that he institute regulations requiring county officials to review
every ballot, looking for the stray marks. Instead, Coffman chose to re-certify
the machines, which are used in 47 Colorado counties, without the extra regulations.
That creates the possibility
that some counties using the Hart scanners may be having dust problems and not
know it.
“We’re
thorough,” Hall said. “We went above and beyond. If we were doing
(Colorado’s) normal audit process, we might not even find this
error.”
Hall discovered the error
Saturday when an election worker noticed there was a lot of “noise”
in the digital picture of a ballot. On that particular ballot, the noise
didn’t cause any mis-votes, but Hall was concerned. She had her workers
dig through ballots that had already been scanned until they found a few
errors, triggering a massive effort to look at every single ballot.
According to Gideon of
VotersUnite!, that kind of attention to detail is far above what he’s
noticed in other parts of the country. In his home state of Washington, nearly
all the ballots are scanned on a similar system, but there is no audit process
or double-checking.
“We just trust the
machines,” he said.
Yakima County in Washington did
report a similar dust problem with its scanners in 2004, but it was only caught
because a close race for governor triggered a mandatory recount.
According to Neal McBurnett, a
local computer scientist who has been helping develop better election auditing
processes for years, this type of behavior isn’t unusual. Instead, he
thinks what Boulder County is doing is unusual.
“Hillary (Hall) is
stepping up to look for errors — in this case, little specks of paper or
paper dust,” McBurnett said. “Normally, you just wouldn’t
notice.”
Comments
Posted by david on November 5,
2008 at 10:25 p.m. (Suggest removal)
How many
messes in a row until we say Hillary Hall is not up to the job? http://www.davidthielen.info/politics...
Posted by springerwannab on
November 5, 2008 at 10:54 p.m. (Suggest removal)
Uh,
wasn't that the basis of her campaign? Speed and accuracy?
Posted by ideologicalcuddle on
November 6, 2008 at 12:08 a.m. (Suggest removal)
Hillary
should be applauded for noticing and dealing with these errors. Other counties
just didn't bother checking. Hopefully in future, this is a problem that can be
mitigated. But at least we'll have accurate vote counts.
Posted by johnny.sunshine on
November 6, 2008 at 1:38 a.m. (Suggest removal)
I wonder
if this mightn't be partly a product of our unusually low humidity compared to
other parts of the country, especially as the temperature drops, perhaps
increasing either the amount of dust coming off the paper because it's drier
than usual, or the dust's ability to acquire and hold a charge.
At the
very least, two cheap fixes might be to: 1) get a humidifier going in the
counting room, and perhaps next year in the area where the paper ballots are
kept before the election, and 2) spray a mix of fabric softener and water onto
the carpet to reduce the amount of charge people impart to the equipment as
they scuffle around. There are more expensive and perhaps chemical-sensitive-friendly
products that do the same thing, but unscented Downy and water (one capful to a
spray bottle) works fine and is dirt cheap. This being Boulder, someone will
probably mention if that's now considered not healthy.
And, of
course, canned air, but that's been mentioned. And I assume the equipment
itself is grounded to an outlet in which the ground actually is hooked up -
you'd be surprised how often it isn't. Not sure how much that would help,
though, as the glass lenses won't, I think, lose their charge merely by
grounding the metal around them.
Any
thoughts, techies?
Posted by boulderhippie on
November 6, 2008 at 5:55 a.m. (Suggest removal)
Thanks
for reconfirming for that my vote doesn't count.
Posted by boulder24 on November
6, 2008 at 6:42 a.m. (Suggest removal)
Thank you
Ms. Hall for making sure that my vote is going to count by making the tough decicion
to do your job and ingnore the criticism that it has invited!
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