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Re: Un-setting for election



Ken as far as I know the customer pays our salaries and gives us a reason to have a company. If due to the customers requirements the need to create disks for early voting is 2 weeks prior to election day, that is their prerogative.  If they do not have all the information and facilities ready at that time to set IP address and phone numbers at that time is also their prerogative. If we what to sell them our product we must conform to their requirements. Or we just tell them that our system is not flexible and that if he (the customer) does not change to our idea of how an election must run, then we can not help him. 
 
We need to make our system flexible to the fact that we the regular workers and the customers are not perfect. Your job as I see it is to fix the problems that we and the customers encounter as we run the elections.  
 
We are the only manpower Global has to at this time, make the best of it, if not,many of you will have to be here having to explain to the customer how stupid he is because he did not run his election the way we feel it should be run...
 
One of the main reason that many customers look at our electronic system for early voting is due to the fact that the should be able to change their election down to the wire without re burning memory cards and reprinting ballots.  If this is not the case then we should not sell this product for early voting. 
----- Original Message -----
From: Ken Clark
Sent: Tuesday, October 26, 1999 11:09 AM
Subject: Un-setting for election

I figured it would be worth 5 minutes to explain to those people not yet trained in GEMS what set for election does.  People who have run GEMS elections before might want to skip this mail. 
 
Set for election puts locks on the user interface to prevent any tampering with the database that can change the contents of memory cards (and now TS floppy disks).  If you un set for election, you need to reprogram your memory cards.  The Poll Book and GEMS software has checks in place to prevent memory cards from being uploaded who's contents could have changed.
 
Gaston created two memory cards and then unset because (as I understand it) they did not have time to enter in the server IP address and phone numbers of the polling place vote centers.  This are only two well-known memory cards with the wrong version, so this should be manageable.  We can create a version of GEMS and the Poll Book that does not perform these checks for them, as a one shot only hack.  This special Poll Book should only be used for the two special memory cards, and the GEMS only for this election.
 
El Paso however has no reason I am aware of to run the hacked release.  Unlike Gaston, all machines in El Paso are early voting, so there is no reason that the database needed to be unset.  If it has been unset, please explain when and why so we can make a determination on how to proceed.  We can of course run the hacked version in El Paso;  however, doing so without even why the election was unset is courting disaster.
 
Ken

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