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Re: Permanent counter for the Accu-Vote OS

NYSBOE has no category for "mark sense scanners" in the election districts.  Their election laws state that voting machines have permanent protective counters visible to the public at all times.  The Accu-Vote is not a voting machine, it is a "mark sense scanner".  Therefore the Accu-Vote does not require a permanent protective counter at this time. 
 
If we do require this for the future, the battery powered chip is acceptable.  The logic being that  when the mechanical counters have to be replaced, they start at 000000, and the replaced count is recorded.
 
The City of New York and the 5 boroughs will have a paper ballot (the Sequoia ballot) for a primary this September.  They are planning on renting hundreds of small scanners to tabulate to tabulate centrally.
 
They need our help.
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Thursday, June 21, 2001 3:57 PM
Subject: Re: Permanent counter for the Accu-Vote OS

Ken Clark wrote:
Guy, can you elaborate a bit, and give an idea of the effort involved.  Mostly just curious.


  Iff the solution was to use a Dallas RAM socket product that provides battery backup for one of the AV's RAM chips, then we could save whatever we wanted in that space.  This would be a natural place to store timezone information that would allow us automatically handle daylight savings time.

  Of course there are some technical hurdles to address before getting too excited about this and I haven't been convinced that a number stored in battery backed RAM would meet the NY state requirements for a permanent counter.  It's just the only idea that I've had so far in how we might handle this.

  BTW, the RTC chip (a Dallas SmartWatch Socket) cannot store any extra data for us so it won't help directly.

  As for effort, it would require major restructuring of the AV's firmware and complete system testing.  I should sit down with Tab and work out some details before estimating the effort involved.  Off the top of my head I suggested that Greg think on the order of $20K for software development.

  Greg, could you possibly find out if battery backed RAM would be acceptable and, if so, what would be required in the case of the battery dying?

           Guy