[Date Prev][Date Next] [Chronological] [Thread] [Top]

RE: 1-7-5



I would REALLY not like to give up the option of changing the candidate and race labels after Set for Election -  I have used it in the past and it is a useful and sometimes necessary feature.   Could we please keep it?
Tari 
This is a really tough one.   Just to repeat the issue so everyone is familiar:  Allowing candidate labels to change after set-for-election means that people can change the order of the candidates in the race (by re-labeling).  You would then get results on the SOVC and Summary in GEMS that differed from the result tape on the AccuVote.  Even worse, you could reprogram some memory cards and not others after the candidate change.  The obvious solution is to force all memory cards to be reprogrammed.
 
Everyone is in agreement however that it is REALLY nice to be able to fix spelling mistakes after memory cards are programmed.  These mistakes are almost always found during the L&A process when people run their test reports, and reprogramming more than 100 memory cards is a serious pain.   No one seems to care that the spelling mistake is still on the tapes. 
 
We will restore the 1.7.4 behavior in the next GEMS release.  Appreciate though that this is a very slippery slope.  We could allow all kinds of changes we currently disallow after set-for-election as long as we trust the user to reprogram the right vote centers.  GEMS is supposed to prevent such mistakes though.  Sometime before we go to Nichols for certification we will be adding user action logging to GEMS, in which case we at least have a defensible response to the security issue.
 
Feedback is welcome on this.  Are all the label changes just spelling mistakes?  Are the changes usually to jurisdiction wide races, or to races that are just on a few memory cards.  If we only required those memory cards that changed to be reprogrammed, would that be enough? 
 
Ken