3 ms·

IME the physical issues I've seen are entirely operator/technician error. I've really not seen any issues inside my wheelhouse. I feel for the devs having to c

IME the physical issues I've seen are entirely operator/technician error. I've really not seen any issues inside my wheelhouse. I feel for the devs having to codify abberant voting procedures.

specialist 6y ago
I'm not entirely certain that you're defending the gear. Or blaming the users. In case you are, I'll share two of my personal experiences. I hot fixed the VVPAT for my poll site's touchscreen. The cheap bent metal got warped, preventing correct operation. Imagine you had to change the thermal paper for a cash register made by lowest bid contractor designed by grifters who've never seen a cash register. These units were worse. I attended a handful of the "logic and accuracy" tests. One time, both the printer and memory card reader failed, of the the unit randomly chosen for testing. So they swamped parts and cards until they got it to work. Deemed a success. In truth, the only thing proven was that one of their printers could make marks on paper, given enough fiddling.
- scollet 6y ago
  I will defer to your knowledge because it appears you have a deeper understanding of the internals. At a user level for me in this last general, the only issues I've observed have been independent of the machine(s). We are perhaps looking at different machines on different timelines and locale, but I don't doubt that there is a long way to go in terms of reliability and efficacy.
  - specialist 6y ago
    Thank you for followup. Because everyone does everything their own way, it's very hard to generalize about elections in the USA. Which is a problem all on its own. In reflecting on your direct observations (experiences), I'm chewing on why we have different assumptions. I'd say most of the time, most of the gear and procedures work pretty good. Prior to a botched local election in 2004, I had a very high opinion of my local election administration. And it was only after really digging into the problem space that I started to see when the reality didn't quite match the narrative. One thing noob me didn't appreciate was that with FPTP form of elections, our system is unnecessarily brittle. My large county has at least one mandatory manual recount every general election. Triggered when the margin of victory is smaller than the error rate. That's when the real drama starts. Honestly, I feel ridiculous obsessing over jitter in the process when the correct fix is to switch to a more robust form of elections. If we switched to a combo of ranked choice voting and proportional representation, the stakes would be so much lower, and trust in the process would be so much higher. Again, thank you for replying. I'm grateful that you and many others have leaned into this issue. More eyeballs (attention) is better.
- scollet 6y ago
  Sorry, to answer your first statement, I am not blaming users as people interacting with the UI. I am not blaming the engineers either. I am more curious why some machines operate inefficiently under the circumstances I experienced. This was power balancing combined(?) with minor reader issues.

IME the physical issues I've seen are entirely operator/technician error. I've really not seen any issues inside my wheelhouse. I feel for the devs having to codify abberant voting procedures.

specialist 6y ago

I'm not entirely certain that you're defending the gear. Or blaming the users. In case you are, I'll share two of my personal experiences. I hot fixed the VVPAT for my poll site's touchscreen. The cheap bent metal got warped, preventing correct operation. Imagine you had to change the thermal paper for a cash register made by lowest bid contractor designed by grifters who've never seen a cash register. These units were worse. I attended a handful of the "logic and accuracy" tests. One time, both the printer and memory card reader failed, of the the unit randomly chosen for testing. So they swamped parts and cards until they got it to work. Deemed a success. In truth, the only thing proven was that one of their printers could make marks on paper, given enough fiddling.

scollet 6y ago
I will defer to your knowledge because it appears you have a deeper understanding of the internals. At a user level for me in this last general, the only issues I've observed have been independent of the machine(s). We are perhaps looking at different machines on different timelines and locale, but I don't doubt that there is a long way to go in terms of reliability and efficacy.
- specialist 6y ago
  Thank you for followup. Because everyone does everything their own way, it's very hard to generalize about elections in the USA. Which is a problem all on its own. In reflecting on your direct observations (experiences), I'm chewing on why we have different assumptions. I'd say most of the time, most of the gear and procedures work pretty good. Prior to a botched local election in 2004, I had a very high opinion of my local election administration. And it was only after really digging into the problem space that I started to see when the reality didn't quite match the narrative. One thing noob me didn't appreciate was that with FPTP form of elections, our system is unnecessarily brittle. My large county has at least one mandatory manual recount every general election. Triggered when the margin of victory is smaller than the error rate. That's when the real drama starts. Honestly, I feel ridiculous obsessing over jitter in the process when the correct fix is to switch to a more robust form of elections. If we switched to a combo of ranked choice voting and proportional representation, the stakes would be so much lower, and trust in the process would be so much higher. Again, thank you for replying. I'm grateful that you and many others have leaned into this issue. More eyeballs (attention) is better.
scollet 6y ago
Sorry, to answer your first statement, I am not blaming users as people interacting with the UI. I am not blaming the engineers either. I am more curious why some machines operate inefficiently under the circumstances I experienced. This was power balancing combined(?) with minor reader issues.