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
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