EAC - Voluntary Voting System Guidelines

Name : | Stanley A. Klein
Organization : | N/A
Post Date : | 9/30/2005
Section Comments
Section : | 3.4.3
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Comment : | Citizen observations in Maryland TrueVote Maryland had observers in 108 of Maryland's 1787 precincts during the 2004 general election. The observers reported 201 “machinerelated” problems in a number of categories. I reallocated the categories to identify specific voting machine failures on election day. For example, failures of the smart card encoder, while they are overall system failures, were not allocated to voting machine failure. Also, candidates and other contests/issues missing from the ballot were reallocated as a machine failure during election setup, not election day. After reallocation, the total election day machine failures were 111. Providing 16000 machines for 1787 precincts gives an average of 8.95 machines per precinct. Multiplying by the number of precincts covered gives 967 machines observed. Having 111 election day failures in 967 machines is a failure probability of 11.4%. TrueVoteMD only recorded observable failures, but it is reasonable to assume there were also unobservable failures. Note that the 9.2% MTBFspecificationbased failure rate allows 1472 failures in 1787 precincts meaning that, within the FEC standards and the draft VVSG, over 80% of precincts can experience an observable or unobservable voting machine failure.