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