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 -----
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
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Dogs can't tell its not bacon.
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