John Haranzo of Seminole
reports that the unit Ian has in hand had two memory card
failures during the recount of one precinct. (Mickey Martin was operating the
unit which may explain everything) The third downloaded card was successful at completing the
count at which point they shelved the unit. Because this seems site specific to the ration of card
failures 7 in 130 precincts and in general we had few across Florida and
Georgia. Could the AV download
unit cabled to the Host be problematic and if so should that be sent to McKinney
for testing.
John
-----Original Message-----
From: owner-support@gesn.com
[mailto:owner-support@gesn.com]On Behalf Of John
McLaurin
Sent: Thursday, January 18, 2001
4:56 PM
To: support@gesn.com
Subject: RE: Memory card checksum
errors (was: 2000 November Election)
Tab,
I
will be visiting with Lana on Monday and will ascertain the particulars related
to the second memory card. One
concern I’ve had all along is “if” we are getting the full story from Lana.
I’ll
be back in touch and thanks for all of y’alls (that’s southern for all of you)
help.
John
-----Original Message-----
From: owner-support@gesn.com
[mailto:owner-support@gesn.com]On Behalf Of Talbot
Iredale
Sent: Thursday, January 18, 2001
4:31 PM
To: support@gesn.com
Subject: Re: Memory card checksum
errors (was: 2000 November Election)
John,
Here is all the
information I have about the 'negative' counts.
- Only
the presidential totals were incorrect. All the other races the sum of the
votes + under votes + blank votes = sum of ballots cast.
- The
problem precinct had two memcory cards uploaded. The second one is the one
I believe caused the problem. They were uploaded on the same port approx.
1 hour apart. As far as I know there should only have been one memory card
uploaded. I asked you to check this out when the problem first
occured but have not heard back as to whether this is true.
- When
the precinct was cleared and re-uploaded (only one memory card as far as I
know) everything was fine.
- Given
that we transfer data in ascii form not binary and given the way the data
was 'invalid' the error could not have occured during transmission.
Therefore the error could only occur in one of four ways:
- Corrupt memory card. This is the most likely
explaination for the problem but since I know nothing about the 'second'
memory card I have no ability to confirm the probability of this.
- Invalid read from good memory card. This is unlikely since
the candidates results for the race are not all read at the same time and
the corruption was limited to a single race. There is a possiblilty
that a section of the memory card was bad but since I do not know
anything more about the 'second' memory card I cannot validate this.
- Corruption of memory, whether on the host or
Accu-Vote. Again this is unlikely due to the localization of the
problem to a single race.
- Invalid memory card (i.e. one that should not have been
uploaded). There is always the possiblity that the 'second memory
card' or 'second upload' came from an un-authorised source.
If this problem is to
be properly answered we need to determine where the 'second' memory card is or
whether it even exists. I do know that there were two uploads from two
different memory cards (copy 0 (master) and copy 3).
Tab