|
There are two possible solutions to their requirements. The first, which is roughly what you suggest, is to allow reporting at the base precinct level. We are currently talking about allowing this as part of our AccuTouch integration work. Appreciate, however, that this is a truly massive change -- remember, the report precinct is currently our fundamental unit of reporting. In particular, it will require changing substantially the way that the AccuVote accumulates totals. I will write more on these changes when we get the details hammered out. Consider, for example, what happens to combined absentee report precincts if we were to just blindly accumulate at the base precinct level. We intend to start work on this after the initial AccuTouch merge is complete. I hope to have the initial merge complete by March, and it will take three or four dedicated months after that to make the changes necessary to report by base precinct. The second option is to use the California Presidential Primary solution. There was an RCR from Steve Knecht about that some time ago. The idea here is to add a new race type: "CounterGroup Override". The poll worker would "vote" this race to indicate which counter to accumulate the totals into. Again, this will require nontrivial changes to the AccuVote firmware. The current commitment is to have this feature ready in time for the next California primary, ie at the end of this year. Basically, it will be included in the AccuVote 2.1 firmware. We will have a better idea on the timeframe for 2.1 after 2.0 is released in a couple of months.
To split out the totals for their upcoming election, there are exactly three solutions that coincide with the three ways the AccuVote organizes counters: by counter group, by precinct, and by race. They can split out the votes by counter group by putting two AccuVotes in the precincts that count both inside and outside the service areas. They would then report by one or both counter groups. They can split out the votes by precinct by dividing their split precincts into multiple report precincts. They would then report by the jurisdiction wide district, and the service area district. They can split out the votes by race by creating two races with identical candidates. They would have to add up the candidate totals for both races by hand in this case.
I would agree with Rob Chen that putting two AVs in the vote centers that count both inside and outside the service area is the best alternative. Ken
|