[ale] Its over. Maybe

[aaron]

On Thursday 04 November 2004 23:00, Bob Toxen wrote:
> On Thu, Nov 04, 2004 at 05:43:50PM -0500, Mike Millson wrote:

> > Apparently in Oregon they allow everyone to vote by mail. Seems like a
> > better, more practical solution than electronic voting machines. No
> > wasting gas and time to go to a polling place and wait in line. Ballots
> > can be tabulated electronically be a machine.

> My understanding (though I'm not sure) is that in Georgia, a worker
> takes your absentee ballot and -- guess what -- keys it into a
> Diebold machine.  So much for my getting my vote counted.

Close... Here's how I saw absentee votes handled in Gwinnett:

The absentee ballots, pre-grouped by precinct, are opened by hand and 
tabulated by optical scanners starting at the close of polls on election day. 
Damaged or scanner rejected ballots have their vote choice markings manually 
recreated  onto new scanner readable cards by pairs of election officials. 
This year, Gwinnett also had a dual-party group of 6 judges on hand to make 
determinations of intent for any overvotes (e.g., a ballot was marked for 
Kerry, but was also marked with a presidential write in with Kerry's name 
there as well. In this example, the judges determined that the voter's 
obvious intent was to post 2 votes for the decorated war hero's awol 
repub-lie-con opponent..;-).

The scanners produce a paper tape record of the totals. THEN those totals are 
manually keyed in to the Diebold software on the Central Tabulation machine.  
I really expect that all the other Counties use optical scanners for 
totalling the absentee ballots as well; the machines were very efficient and 
seemed to catch most all the damaged and mis-marked ballots. Gwinnett had 
plenty of those machines to sell, too, since Cox downgraded their systems to 
Diebold just a year after Gwinnett had bought about 5,000 optical scanners.

In any case, the absentee ballots are the only physical paper evidence we have 
for a lot of out elections right now. Where ever possible, we should be 
manually tabulating and comparing them against the electronic and scanner 
totals. They present more than enough sample size to provide a solid 
statistical comparison, even down to a precinct by precinct basis. A heck of 
a lot better than no auditing at all!!

peace
(because all certain futures are found in a present peace)
aaron

> Bob Toxen
> bob at verysecurelinux.com               [Please use for email to me]
> http://www.verysecurelinux.com        [Network&Linux/Unix security 
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