At the request of the Secretary of the State, Dr. Alex Shvartsman and his team at the UConn VoTeR Center tested memory cards which were shipped to UConn by registrars across the state. <full report>
From the summary:
The total of 522 cards were received and tested by the VoTeR Center, out of which 378 cards were received before the election. Out of the total number of cards, 18 cards, or 3.5% were found to contain “junk” data, that is, they were unreadable, which is easily detected by the tabulators as such, and could not have been used in the election. The rest of the cards, or 96.6%, were found to have been properly programmed for election. These cards contained valid ballot data and the executable code on these cards was the expected code, with no extraneous data or code on the cards.
About half of the cards were found to have been tested and set for election-the intended state of the cards following the prescribed testing procedure. Most of the remaining cards were tested by the towns but not set for election; while this is not a problem, this suggested that the relevant towns/districts either misunderstood the instructions or did not follow the instructions. One card was found in the state set for election but with non-zero counters, indicating that the district tested he card in election mode and did not reset the card. This is a potentially problematic, but detectable situation, since proper procedures require that the “zero counter” report is produced at the start of the election
Full Disclosure: I played a role in suggesting this program to the Secretary of the State’s office at a meeting in October. Professor Michael Fisher of Yale and TrueVoteCT greatly improved on my suggestion. Continue reading “96.6% Of Memory Cards OK, Half Of Registrars Follow Last Minute Procedures”