RE: Hand Recounts of votes recorded on DREs
Rebecca
Your claim that you cannot see whether an undervote for an office is
caused by intention of the voter or voter's mistake.
(Simple data entry mistakes by the voter in some states where straight
party voting is used are not uncommon, straight party vote first and
then try to vote again for several offices, deleting the choice.)
Machines tested in accordance with FEC 2002 also register the zero votes
for an office, which means that the registering function is tested with
every CVR including zero votes, if the test fails the machine is
blocked. So the number of residual votes is per definition not
influenced by machine failures.
Jacques Hulshof
N.V. Nederlandsche Apparatenfabriek "Nedap"
+ 31 (0) 544 471 162 (Phone); + 31 (0) 544 463 475 (Fax)
+ 31 (0) 6 53718821 (Mobile); jacques.hulshof@nedap.com
Parallelweg 2, NL-7141 DC Groenlo
or P.O. Box 6, NL-7140 AA Groenlo, The Netherlands
-----Original Message-----
From: R. Mercuri [mailto:notable@MINDSPRING.COM]
Sent: zondag 12 december 2004 18:07
To: Brit Williams; Ted Selker; Arthur Keller
Cc: stds-1583-stg3@IEEE.ORG; stds-1583-disc@IEEE.ORG;
stds-1583-tg1@IEEE.ORG; stds-1583-tg2@IEEE.ORG
Subject: Re: Hand Recounts of votes recorded on DREs
In answer to Brit's and Vern's questions:
I "get my numbers" from the OFFICIAL reports that
are issued by the secretaries of state following
elections. Various studies, including some by MIT/Caltech
show residual rates in the 3-5% range, as much as 9% in
some cases for DREs. In the California Gubernatorial Recall,
for example, the residual vote rate for the yes/no and
gubernatorial choice combined was 4.98% for the Diebold
Accu-Vote-TS, NOT 1.5% as Diebold has (frequently) claimed.
Residual vote rates are unexplained because they lump
together undervotes and overvotes (on systems that have
those) that may include both deliberate choices by voters
to skip a ballot question and machine errors. There
is no way to confirm whether Georgia's (or any DRE)
residual vote rate is due to intentional undervotes
or computer error, because there is no way to INDEPENDENTLY
audit the vote casting and tallying systems.
Rebecca Mercuri.