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RE: Central Count

To: Global Support
Subject: Central Count

Is there a password protection on central count to make sure no one can get into the count totals prior to election day?
 
Not unless you mean the password to get into windows and the password to get into GEMS.  There is however a related RCR.  Attached is the response.
 
Ken
 
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Laramie County, Wyoming as well as other counties being supported by Tari Runyan require password protection for the GEMS Manual Entry screen.

This RCR came up before in the guise of "password protection" on resetting vote centers (which is really the same thing as doing manual entry and entering in a bunch of zeros) and was rejected at the time.
 
This is certainly easy enough to do.  I am tempted to give a long diatribe on why it doesn't make much sense (I think I did back for the clear case), but I think I will spare folks this time.  It is too easy to do to reject it twice, and I am just back from vacation(*).  It will have to be some kind of option, since Alaska (and other civilized accounts) will be annoyed after the 23rd time they need to re-enter for manual entry the same password as they did when they logged on.  I caution that one day we are going to wake up with one too many options for GEMS to be usable though.
 
There was no deadline on this RCR.  Follow up with the time frame in which Laramie will cancel their account because of noncompliance with their statutes, and we'll see to it that this feature is added by then.  We will probably add an option "password protect counters" flag to the user dialog, and then nag the operator for:
  • Manual entry
  • Deleting central count decks
  • Resetting vote centers
  • Resetting election
  • Changing election mode to and from set-for-election
In a related topic, we don't do any logging of counters that have been manually modified.  This is a feature that does make security sense, and I have wanted it for a while.  What has held it up is not really knowing where to report it.  We could for example put an asterisk beside all precincts in the SOVC where the results were manually modified, but the reality of how people conduct elections will make that fairly unpopular.  Another GEMS option I suppose...
 
Ken
 
(*) Someone should probably re-submit log printers while I am in this mood.
 
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