I am
told this has come up in the past with VTS (perhaps Minnesota), but we were able
to convince them that an electronic log is better. It is infinitely
more likely for a line printer to fail on election night than it is for a RAID
disk to fail, so this feature does not make much sense on technical
merit. Paper trails of a log file can be generated at any time based on
the electronic log. If people know of other jurisdictions other than Texas
that require this, please follow up.
GEMS does of course log election activity on
election night. We do that through the Upload, Central Count, and Poster
logs. Review these logs and see if the information there is
sufficient for Texas. The logging for AccuVote-TS upload is currently
lacking -- I will improve it to the level of AccuVote logging, so just review
the that log for how it will work. Follow up in detail with any events
that need logging but we don't currently track.
Also
forward to me whatever applicable Texas state statutes so we can review what is
required by law regarding the line printer (just photocopy the sections).
I know we had some kind of certification to run elections with our software
previously since we ran six precincts in Dallas last year (without the line
printing feature of course).
This
feature is not trivial to implement since we have multiple log files that
operate asynchronously. That is, GEMS performs multiple tasks
simultaneously and logs the events in separate files, while presumably there
would be only one log printer attached to the system. I already have
visions of a software bug where GEMS crashes when the line printer fails (ever
see your home software do that?), so we would have to be very careful with any
implementation.
Ken
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