Crossposted from
Truth 2 Power Blog.
My Interview with Video The Vote on Election Eve.
On this YouTube Video as a Pollworker I describe the two new ES&S voting machines which were used during the 2006 Midterm Elections in Los Angeles Country, which had been sitting in my living room for over a week prior to November 7th.
I discuss the various security concerns and safeguards which have been put in place to protect the vote and these machines from possible tampering.
On election night our Precinct ran smoothly. We had approximately 280 Voters come through, 20 of those had to use provisional ballots because they were not listed on our voter roster. (Most had come to the wrong polling location - as the County gradually shifts the precincts around in preparation for full electronic voting at "Neighborhood Voting Centers" (NVCs).
Overall turnout (number of signatures in roster vs total registerd voters in the precinct) was about 23%. 18 ballots were cast with Overvotes (Two or more choices selected for the same race) and were rejected by our Precinct Ballot Reader. (Which is a failure rate of about 7%) In all but two of those cases the voter cast a new ballot and it was accepted, the others simply let the ballot go through as it was with the mistakes intact. In previous years a ballot with an overvote would have been entirely rejected and not counted, but this year for the first time only the race which includes the overvote will be ignored.
Two voters entered blank ballots and had those ballots rejected. They successfully revoted.
This means that voter "turnout" should have increased by between 5-10% across the entire county due to the use of these machines, simply because ballots that would have been rejected would now be counted and included in the final tally.
On the tape I mention that voters essentially had "Three Strikes and your out" - meaning they had three chances to successfully vote. This became a bit of a discussion with the people at Election Protection, but the bottom line was that I was correct - technically. California State Law only allows a voter to have two correction ballots (three total). We didn't have anyone go to the third ballot - but we did have one person who had significant errors twice in a row. He walked out in disgust and we entered his ballot with the "Override" so that his remaining errors would be ignored. This could also have been done if he'd tried to use a third ballot and still had received errors.
My own mother, who was the Precinct Inspector, made an overvote mistake on her ballot which the machine caught. In as many cases as we could we would manually verify the overvote reported by the machine and show this to the voter so that they could understand what the mistake had been and how to correct it. Usually people with weaker eyesight had simply punched one hole above or below where they intended and created an overvote.
Overall for us, things went smoothly - we ran into no significant problems. As it turned out though - we were lucky.
Some of the other poll workers interviewed by Video the Vote from West Hollywood (a Very Heavily Democratic District I think - since the Polls were at the Gay and Lesbian Center!) were going through a veritable nightmare with these machines at their NVC which included three precincts in one location. I actually talked to this pollworker myself on election day and the situations was that one of the inspectors and all their materials were sent to another location, so every voter who arrived for that precinct had to be put on provisional ballots (which ended up being around 200) because they had no Roster to verify if those people were legal voters or not.
They didn't have any ballots for that precinct - so they had to use the sample ballots that were only supposed to used for demostration purposes. (But are still a valid backup).
They had two voting machines - but one of them failed totally, while the second was having a wiring problem and would short out and restart. As a result they were only using one machine for three precincts and some of the ballots were generating a message "Ballot Error" when entered.
As these Precinct Ballot Reader machines are started and initialized, a special card has to be put into the machine. I examined this card and found that it was very much like an old school IBM Punch Card (I mean real... old school - like from the 70's. Admittedly my computer experience actually does go back that far - I was pratically a blastocyst with an Atari). The punch holes on the ballots matched this card exactly, and the ballots themselves included a unique Serial Number which matched the Serial Number for the Precinct.
From a programming and systems design background it seems to me that each machine was probably pre-programmed with the ballot for every portion of L.A.County, including any local initiatives which would only be valid in certain cities. On election day the reader would read the setup card, and use it to identify which precinct it was currently located in, then call up the approprate ballot template to check for overvotes. From what I could tell this was the only way things could have been functioning, or else they would have had to preload only one precinct per machine and then make sure they gave the right machine to the correct inspector. (Em, I don't think so...)
This of course made me suspect that the West Hollywood "Ballot Error" was the result of trying to place two precincts ballots through the same reader. I haven't yet been able to confirm this yet, but I strongly suspect this was the case.
I don't know if the fact that our district is almost equally split between Democrats and Republicans is part of why things went fine without a glitch while a heavily Democratic District went through veritable hell. Was simply it human error or more? Hard to say at this point. But as more and more Election After Action Reports come through, we might eventually be able to see a pattern emerge or not.
One thing we can't afford to do - is not pay attention.
Vyan
Security Note: On the Video I discuss the security tabs which is used to cover an RS-232 ethernet port on the Ballot Reader. When I got a better look I discovered that those tabs were reenforced and individually numbered. Also I stated that the machine had no memory card - but during the election I discovered a second security tab which was placed over a locked door on the lower left side of the machine, below the touchscreen (I tried to get a picture of it above). Exactly what is behind that door, I don't know - but it clearly means that there might have been more externally adjustable elements than I had previously seen.
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