October 25, 2006

"Officials see significant errors in electronic voting test run"

"Numerous human errors reported during pre-election tests of new electronic voting machines have voting advocates worried that similar mistakes will be repeated by county voters in two weeks.

With the election scheduled for Nov. 7, test votes cast by trained personnel Thursday, which was the first day of pre-election tests of the new equipment, failed to match up to the voting "scripts" they were given by elections officials 40 percent of the time, David Tom, county elections manager, said. The number of errors in the so-called Logic and Accuracy tests dropped to 25 percent on Wednesday and about 14 percent on Friday, with all errors eliminated by Monday morning, Tom said.

All of the errors were attributed to tester error, most often caused when a tester failed to select the predetermined candidate in the "script" they were following or mistakenly skipped a race altogether, Tom said. "The equipment was new to them, so there was a higher number of errors than we would like," Tom said.

Voting advocates, however, said the high prevalence of errors in using the machines — which required the elections department to extend the number of test days from three to six — raises concerns about whether voters will be able to operate the eSlate machines, made by Hart InterCivic. "I witnessed two adults at each of the eight test machines whose sole purpose was to input test votes correctly and for there to be such a high rate of human error is hard to believe," said Brent Turner, founder the San Mateo Election Integrity League and a member of the California Election Protection Network.

A roaming elections official was also present to assist with questions during the test, officials said.

The mistakes were made in spite of eSlate voting machine protocol that questions voters on their selections - including races they left blank - and provides a printed verifiable ballot, said Dennis Paull, a county poll inspector and election observer for the Democratic Central Committee."

The story is here.

Posted by Randy Riddle at October 25, 2006 08:44 AM