Washblog

The new DRS units should arrive Monday 1/20 1/14. KCE and the Secretary of State's Office will start "testing" the machines. (My brief look at the testing plan was not confidence inspiring. I'll try to work up the fortitude to address the specifics in another post.)

KCE believes the DRS will receive federal certification in early February. That's a safe bet. "Independent Testing Authority" SysTest is "testing" the DRS. As Avi Rubin relates in The Dirty Little Secrets of Voting System Testing Labs:

The Systest representative ... replied that they were only required to test against the standard. When pressed about whether or not the ITAs would fail a system if a serious flaw was found, the reply was that a memo would be written, but that the system would still pass. I couldn't believe it. The company that was tasked with certifying machines for elections in the United States would still pass them, even if a serious flaw was found, as long as the machine did not violate any aspects of the standard. Unbelievable.

I agree.

The DRS units will be used for the first time during the May 20th special election.

The "Go or No Go?" decision for forced mail voting has to happen no later than the week of Monday May 19th. Before the May election has even been counted, much less certified. Why? Because ballots must be sent out 90 days prior to the August 19th primary.

This surprised me. I thought the DRS supported our existing ballots. I'm guessing the DRS units require different ballot design ("artwork"). I'll need to add "change design of ballots" to the reckless plan's list of risks.

There Is No Plan 'B'

Among all the other tall tales, King County Elections has argued they need an all new tabulation system because the database in the existing system can't handle a forced mail election. The experts, the CEOC, and we activists disagreed.

Making this many changes so late in the election cycle is ill-advised. It's always good to have a backup plan. Acting on our concerns, King County Council expressed its preference that forced mail voting be done with our existing equipment. The so-called Plan 'B'. They even directed King County Elections to fully explore this option.

Elections responded Dec 31st. Desperate to justify buying unnecessary, untested, and very expensive new gear, they spun some novel excuses for why they absolutely must have all new gear.

King County Elections fabricated all new ridiculous "solutions" for Plan B, then summarily dismissed them as infeasible. This kabuki effort ignored the actual workarounds proposed in the independent expert review of the tabulation business case conducted last year.

Let's review:

Database Size Limit

King County experiences the possibility of hitting a two-gigabyte size limit on the ballot tabulation database. This is a well-known issue that the county successfully addressed in the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections. In addition to the Executive's recommendation, King County has several options for addressing this limitation including:

1. King County could sort ballots into batches by precinct before tabulation. With fewer precincts in each batch, the database size will grow at a far slower rate.
2. King County could save the database more frequently, as each time it is saved, data is compressed, and this prevents to 2 Gb size ceiling from being reached.

3. King County could split the ballot tabulation database in approximately two even halves, by legislative districts. With proper determination of which districts to place in which half, whole legislative districts, city and special purpose districts could be placed in one database.

   The aggregation of summary total for the countywide races, such as state and federal races would be accomplished in exactly the same manner as the Secretary of State aggregates statewide races to certify statewide elections. For example, voters residing in Seattle and the northwest part of the county could be placed in one database and voters residing elsewhere in the county could be placed in another database.

   This recommendation would be even more effective for the county if coupled with two arrays of 30 scanners supporting each database, as described in the next section.

The suggestions to count slower and pre-sort the ballots have two very fine virtues:

• It works.
• It's really easy to understand

Alas. King County Elections has its own ideas. The "strategies" they explored are

1. splitting the election results database
2. adding more tabulation machines
3. placing precinct committee officers (PCOs) on a separate ballot
4. adding a second tabulation shift

They then explore in tortuous detail why splitting the database is a bad idea.

Ah. But the experts suggested splitting the election, not the tabulation database. That's very different.

Okay, I'll contrast the "strategies" using an analogy that even our elections officials should be able to understand.

The Lego Blocks Analogy

Imagine counting Lego blocks, with subtotals for each color.

What the experts propose is sorting the blocks by color, counting each color, add up the colors, and reporting the numbers.

What King County Elections proposes is dumping all the blocks it a big bin, remove them one scoop at a time, count the colors in each scoop, and then total each scoop's subtotal.

This isn't hard to understand.

Two of the expert proposals, pre-sort by precinct and splitting the county, are just ways to "sort by color" before counting.

With option 1, for the purposes of the election, King County would be treated as two counties. Perhaps north and south county, perhaps Seattle and The Rest, perhaps some other divide by legislative district. Any well-defined jurisdiction boundary will work. Then no cross tabulation is necessary. As far as the Secretary of State is concerned, on election day there would be one extra county reporting results.

NOTE: that pre-sorting ballots into batches by precinct is a very important precaution for protecting voter privacy. Whatever else is done, this must be done. That King County Elections continues to refuse to do this presort is infuriating. Why did they just blow a few million dollars for TWO new envelope sorters, so that sorting can be done in house, if they're not going to use them?

We're getting Executive Sims' reckless plan to overhaul our elections, just in time to cause a meltdown for our November 2008 general election.

Oh well.