Posted in Ballot Design, Election Adminstration Technology on Jan 14th, 2010
I’d like to thank Eric Rescorla for making an excellent and pithy point about the purpose of publishing images of marked ballots. But first, thanks (again) to Mitch Trachtenberg of the Humboldt Transparency Project for publishing a hand-picked set of ballot images that provide a great example of the difficult borderline cases of interpreting hard-marked [...]
Posted in Voting System Technology on Dec 8th, 2009
In the next step on the topic of voting machines and transparency, let me explain what I meant in a previous posting about a “side effect” of adoption of TTV technology for machine counts of optically scanned ballots. The ballot counting software, like pretty much all we make, logs the heck out of everything, and [...]
Posted in Voting System Technology on Dec 7th, 2009
Today I provide the next step in clarifying TTV goals in relation to discussions with election transparency advocates. Regarding the previous posting, I want to emphasize that voting machines — in this case we focus on paper ballot scanning machines — are a transparency problem, if there is no human involvement in counting paper ballots, [...]
Posted in Election Adminstration Technology on Nov 30th, 2009
The Military and Overseas Voter Empowerment (MOVE) Act is probably not high on your radar screen of activities in the U.S. Congress — but it is important to me, for two reasons, aside from the most basic one that it enables broader access for overseas voters.
The bill avoided partisan politics that usually sidelines any election [...]
Posted in Election Adminstration Technology on Nov 20th, 2009
Check out No Voting Machine Virus in NY-23 Election(from Bo Lipari – Essays and Images:
“Finally, the good news – because New York votes on paper, everybody’s vote was counted. When the scanner stopped working, the ballots were removed and counted, so no votes were lost. Paper ballots, a software independent record of the vote, proved [...]
Posted in Voting System Technology on Nov 18th, 2009
Pennsylvania has ordered a statewide recount of the race for Pennsylvania Superior Court Judge – a recount that is similar in scope and significance as the Minnesota Franken/Coleman recount (though one hopes less acrimonious), as the result will decide who will be making durable rulings in law for the whole state.
It’s an interesting story, for [...]
Posted in Voting System Technology on Nov 17th, 2009
Following a previous post with before-and-after pictures of an ideal “re-modeling”of a ballot, I have a couple notes about how such remodeling is harder in practice; another ballot image to illustrate; and some good news about on-going TTV work on ballot image processing.
That ideal remodeling showed how to both fix one of class of usability [...]
Posted in Voting System Technology on Nov 11th, 2009
In another department of our megaplex one of my colleagues, Aleks Totic is working on ballot layout and design for the TrustTheVote technology suite. I came across this great blog post from the Brennan Center at NYU that describes a recent situation where it appears a simple bit of questionable (but valid) layout may have [...]
Posted in Voting System Technology on Nov 10th, 2009
One of my main concerns these days is the algorithms for scanning paper ballots. In other words, given a paper ballot, some kind of image capture (i.e. a scanner), what is the ‘best’ way to analyze them and determine the ‘voters’ intent?’
Two key [...]
Posted in Voting System Technology on Nov 5th, 2009
In another of our Tales From Real Life series, I direct you to Luther Weeks’ account of a day as an absentee ballot moderator, which involves making judgements about whether absentee ballots should be counted, and when (and when not) to rely on the results of counting machines. Perhaps you didn’t know that this volunteer [...]
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