Boulder County's counting crawls

Joel

The Hart system is simply software which attaches to a variety of COTS (off the shelf) scanners (which is a good idea by the way).

The speed of scanning at full speed depends on the scanner. The Kodak scanners used by Eagle and I am sure the ones used by Boulder

are plenty fast. This isn’t the issue. If anything they are too fast and don’t reliably handle forms which have been on people’s living room tables…

scan problems are of the following nature:

1) Part of ballot is folded under in the stack

2) Ballot upside down (supposedly can be handled, and hart prints ballots with a curved corner to avoid this, but more memory is required)

3) Ballot folds help drag the adjacent ballot into the scanner

4) Ripped ballot gets caught on the next ballot or on the scanner

5) Bar code on ballot is slightly damaged by a mark (this rejection seems to happen unnecessarily, considering that bar codes are very resilient)

6) Foreign material build up on various components in the scanner

The scanner we are using Kodak i610 I think is about 1/sec- plenty fast if the software didn’t screw up in between scanning the batches. (I mean the frequent need to reboot systems, struggle with user interface, etc.)

Also the Hart system allows all scanning to be done before resolving… the ballot images are all stored (inaccessibly as far as I can tell in a big database) so scanning can be done independently of either resolving or of uploading votes to memory cards. This allows a lot of flexibility in use of the equipment.

I think the point is that voting system software can actually aid in hand counting ballots accurately! If you have a scanned image of a ballot you can show a particular contest magnified from one ballot to the next (Hart does this well) and flip through the ballots at 10/second If you want looking for an anomaly. This is an excellent service to those who would check ballots for voter intent. For example, the voting system could assemble all the ballots in which it interpreted the vote to be for McCain and the human operator could actually sequentially visit all those portions of the ballots very quickly to look for anomalies. Such a voting system does not exist today. The system could (Hart doesn’t really do this very well) keep a record of the human interpretation and in principle could then machine mark the vote interpretations in a harmless location on the ballot image or conceivably even on the paper ballot itself (in a different design of system) for later auditing.

I would say that it makes sense that the ballots are being examined one by one, as I think they are in Boulder, on the screen. It is true that very light marks, almost invisible to the naked eye are presented in full black on the image, and so certain stray marks and dust are emphasized on the electronic version of the visible image of the ballot. Certainly with a Hart like system you could do very good machine assisted hand counting (machine suggested human confirmed interpretation and machine tabulation) in the same amount of time that Boulder is spending with the ballots and get probably even better accuracy. With an improved design machine, you could do it much faster, and also do it in precincts.

If the press would stop bad mouthing the speed of producing results from Boulder, we would have a better chance to make a more sensible system in the future.

What happened in Florida with the Republicans and the press bad mouthing the punch cards is an example of what we do NOT want to do again.

All of the above discussion relates for the long term only to mail-in ballots or what happens if we go to all an all mail-in election.

At precinct polls we could hand count (or machine assist hand count) our ballots much sooner because of the larger number of people involved.

Harvie Branscomb

From: joel Leventhal [mailto:jsleventhal@xxxxxxxxx]
Sent: Thursday, November 06, 2008 10:56 AM
To: Harvie Branscomb; Margit Johansson
Cc: ColoradoVoter@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: [SPAM?] Boulder County's counting crawls

Hi Harvie,

what is the stated capacity of the Hart scanner in ballots per min? clearly it is a piece of crap. Even the ES& S will do >200 ballots / min (with stops for ballots that go to resolution committee. So 12,000 per hour. now that is high speed. With the Hart system they might as well do hand counting...... that's your point!! ??

Joel

----- Original Message -----

From: Harvie Branscomb

To: ColoradoVoter@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Cc: Hillary Hall ; 'Margit Johansson' ; 'Deb Adams' ; 'Geof Cahoon' ; 'David Larson' ; angielayton@xxxxxxxx ; 'Ivan Meek' ; 'joseph richey' ; 'Mary Eberle' ; 'Cliff West' ; 'Tom Morris' ; 'Dan Leftwich' ; 'CFVI Attendees' ; 'Citizens for Verifiable Voting' ; 'Al Kolwicz' ; erika jensen ; 'Neal McBurnett' ; Ken Gordon ; 'Morgan Carroll' ; Paul Weissman ; Ron Tupa ; 'Teak Simonton' ; Kathleen Curry ; Jared Polis ; Bill Hobbs ; 'John Kefalas'

Sent: Thursday, November 06, 2008 10:42 AM

Subject: Boulder County's counting crawls

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

By Laura Snider (Contact)
Wednesday, November 5, 2008

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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