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There was one in
Montreal. It doesn't happen a lot, but it happens. Always
has. The Montreal case was really lame because the poll worker phoned
in to election central, and all incidents had to be reported to the two lawyers
they had on hand the whole day. Its pretty tough to convince a voter
everything is fine with a "ballot not read" message on the screen. The
lawyers insisted that the ballot box could not be opened to try to retrieve
the ballot. The voter was issued another ballot. Of course, the
lawyers asked me what they were going to do in a recount. I explained with
my usual charm that they would be off by one, at least.
The problem can't be
fixed without making a fairly major change to the ballots, namely a wider catch
zone. Even with a 1/2" or 3/4" zone it would be hard to guarantee success,
but it would help. A total solution would probably require hardware
changes, especially if we want to keep the existing zones. It was brought
up years ago but a don't ask don't tell policy was adopted instead.
Sometimes this is referred to as the "maybe it was ripped"
policy.
One more interesting
thing to note: the AccuVote knows that it has dropped the
ballot. So the question has always been, should we increment the card
counter, and should we log the event. Currently we do neither. There
are two schools here. One says we should notify the voter, log it, add a
dropped ballot counter, send an incident report to the secretary of state, etc
etc. The other is to increment the counter and send the voter on
their ignorantly blissful way. Right now we kind of split the
difference.
Ken
I've
been informed by Don V. that Cobb County had experienced the same, but they
suspected torn ballots (stubs removed from the ballot bottom also removed
part of the timing mark.) I'll be following that up today by
contacting Beth Kish in Cobb for details.
Perhaps more details can be gathered (by John, Don, and Steve) from the
other accounts experiencing this.
Ian
Gwinnett
County GA testifies to it as a
recurring problem. We’ve had it in Savannah also. One or two in Brevard county in the
Nov. 6th election and one in Duval in the last special
election. All are running
1.94W
-----Original
Message-----
From:
owner-support@gesn.com [mailto:owner-support@gesn.com]On Behalf Of Don Biszmaier
Sent: Tuesday, November 14, 2000 10:46
AM
To:
support@gesn.com
Subject:
Re: AccuVote-OS "passing ballots"
Steve: I have had
it happen a few times and could find no reason for it. At the precinct I
usually suspect poll worker error. But have had it occur on rerun of the
ballots.
Don
----- Original
Message -----
To: Global Sales ;
Global Support
Sent: Tuesday, November
06, 2001 11:13 PM
Subject: AccuVote-OS
"passing ballots"
Also have report from Marin regarding
3 precincts with significant "passed ballots", i.e., ballot going
thru
AccuVote without being counted.
Anyone else experiencing this?
Steve Knecht
Global Election
Systems
415-893-9941 office 415-893-9951 fax
415-225-6591
cell
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