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 [...]
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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 [...]
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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 [...]
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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 [...]
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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 [...]
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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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Posted in Voting System Technology on Oct 30th, 2009
I’m hearing lots of fascinating stuff at the NIST Common Data Format Workshop, but a couple of items really struck me this morning: the contrast between a presentation by a voting system vendor, and a developer of an open source balloting device prototype. Neither of them explicitly asked a very good question about central or [...]
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Posted in Voting System Technology on Oct 30th, 2009
I thought I’d share a comment and response I got about trusting software to count votes. The comment was a very sensible one, though a mis-perception: that TTV is suggesting that software should be trust to count vote correctly. Not so! Here is the true but less simple story.
Many election officials want to conduct elections [...]
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Posted in Voting System Technology on Oct 15th, 2009
Kudos to Brad Friedman for making a good call on a subtle point in his comment on my posting about Bo Lipari’s coverage of the NY State testing of voting systems. Brad objects to my statement that lever machines are not compliant with the Help Amercia Vote Act (HAVA).
And rightly so! The bad news about [...]
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Posted in Voting System Technology on Oct 9th, 2009
Another in our series of real life stories … how it actually works for real election officials to test a new voting system that they might be adopting for use in the state.
The backplot is that New York State has been unwilling to give up its admittedly no-longer-legal* lever machines, until the the state Board [...]
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