Article Contributed on: 10/15/2008 11:37:04 AM
Few of us get the opportunity to watch the process called Logic and Accuracy Testing. It happens in Boulder County when the ballots have arrived; some of them are marked TEST so that the reality check can be made between man and machine.
In case you aren't aware of the process, we use paper ballots here, but they are not counted at the precincts; they are brought back to the County Clerk's ballot center where they are run through scanners that do the tallying. The point of the LAT is to have the machine do the counting, and the people do the counting, and be sure they match.
That provides the Elections office with some assurance that the scanners are actually doing what they are supposed to do. For those of you about to jump out of your chairs screaming "but the machines can be hacked!!!" I am not going to tell you that's not possible. Until the day when the providers give us ALL of the code to double check that there isn't some algorithm that says "do this now, but when the date is election day, do something different, " we can never be completely sure.
Having said that, I most definitely CAN say that we totally under-appreciate the degree of comittment and hard work that is done on the part the Clerk's office staff to implement a system imposed from above by the County Commissioners, the Secretary of State and the Colorado State Assembly; they are doing everything possible to watch out for the voter's interests. Folks at the Clerk's office are working hours that would come out to third world salaries if you really figured it out. They are NOT staying up late trying to find ways to screw us out of our vote; they are trying to make sure everything goes as sanely as possible, given the system they are forced to work with.
If you want to scream at someone about counting votes with scanners, voting machines, and the like, it's the Legislature, the Secretary of State and the Commissioners who need to hear it. They are the ones who do machine certification, insist on getting counts done quickly, and who tend to believe anything the voting machine companies tell them. They are the ones who deal with the lobbyists and the sales people, and make decisions with little or no interest in what we have to say about it.
I will say the counting is faster with the machines, by a longshot, but personally I'd rather see a pad of color-coded ballots that have no numbers on them, given one pad to a voter; with each ballot put in one of two boxes in the voting booth (yes or no), then have the voters stick their fingers in ink, and have the count done in the precincts by simply stacking up the colors and counting the piles, but that's a system that's too simple and doesn't give our legislators the opportunities they crave to spend large amounts of our tax money on complex, energy-sucking, proprietary-software-based systems.
Some things I can tell you about what we have to deal with on election day (and I'm an election judge, so I will have to be one of the folks dealing with it), involve voter responsibility. Given that the science of Artificial Intelligence is still in its infancy, even after all these years, no machine is able to implement the DWIM instruction: Do What I Meant.
Scanners know to look for a given box in a given position on the page, and note if it's filled in with a mark or not. If you decide you checked the wrong box, and you scratch it out and put a new mark in the next box, the stupid machine (all machines are stupid) will simply think you marked both boxes and dump your vote. Your oops will trigger an extra step when the counting is done; a human will have to look to see what you did and try to figure out what you meant. That's also not easy. The reason computers can't do DWIM is because often even humans can't do DWIM, so how do they program a machine to do it? Write in what you meant, so that when the human has to check it out, they understand what you meant, or (and this will also take even more extra work for the folks processing your vote) ask for a new ballot and start again.
The single best way to help the election stay sane is to BE PREPARED when you get there. KNOW who you are going to vote for, and what the issues are, or you will be the one who keeps someone from getting back to work on time because they have to wait for you to plow through the ballot language to figure out what it means, because you didn' t take the time in advance. Materials have been sent out to every voter, so you really have no excuse. Make it bathroom reading if you must, but get it read.
Follow the instructions! If you circle the box the machine goes "is there something in the box, yes or no" it sees nothing, says no and moves on. It's your vote. Make sure it gets counted.
If you don't like the current system, go sit at the door of your representatives and holler. If there isn't the political will to change things, the Commissioners, the Legislature and the Secretary of State will continue on their merry way, deciding regardless of what we think. The Clerk's office doesn't get to make the decisions -- just implement them as best they can.
Those of us raised with computers know that machines are (when programmed correctly) faster and more accurate than humans. Those of us with programming experience know that the "programmed correctly" part is the key issue, and the one we really don't have a final answer to.
The LAT helps us know how voting machines and scanners "think" so we can vote, given the constraints of what they know how to do. I firmly believe the folks in the Clerk's office are honestly doing all they can to protect our interests, but until Computer Science can come up with a totally unhackable machine, provide us with open-source verifiable voting software, or until a fully-paper system is implemented, (only the paper system currently exists) there will always be questions.