EAC - Voluntary Voting System Guidelines

Name : | Stanley A. Klein
Organization : | N/A
Post Date : | 9/30/2005
General Comments
Comment : | Appendix A Extract from Montgomery County Board of Elections After Election Report for November 2004 Election “Information Technology Election Day Review “Election Day Equipment Review “For Election Day, 2,597 voting units were deployed. An additional 80 voting units were sent to about 65 polling places on Election Day to replace malfunctioning units. A few were sent out to accommodate long lines at polling places. “From Help Desk tickets and GEMS reports, 189 voting units (7%) of units deployed failed on Election Day. An additional 122 voting units (or 5%) were suspect based on number of votes captured. “Of the 189 voting units that failed: 1. “On Election morning, 58 voting units failed to boot up, showing a Ballot Exception Error. These units were unusable and were immediately taken out of service. No votes were captured on these units. 2. “106 voting units experienced screen freezes. In staff opinion this is the most serious of errors. Election judges and technical staff reported that many of these units froze when the voter pressed the Cast Ballot button. This leads to great confusion for judges and voters. The voter leaves the polling place with little or no confidence that their vote was counted. In many cases, the election judges are unable to provide substantial confirmation that the vote was, in fact, counted. 3. “25 voting units failed due to a variety of problems including card readers, printers, and power problems. 4. “The additional 122 suspect voting units were identified because few votes were captured compared to other units in the same polling place. A unit was considered suspect if it had 2550 votes captured when all other units in the polling place had over 150 votes. “