[Date Prev][Date Next] [Chronological] [Thread] [Top]

Central Count Reader Testing

One additional factor to note on the central count lucid reader issues.  I will be testing this during the next week.  There are some ballots that continue to get "No Ender" or "Calibration", depending on feed orientation, after being fed 6 or 7 times, but will then finally go through.  I believe what we are seeing here is that these ballots appears to have cuts that are inside the cut mark at the top and below the timing marks at the bottom.  This shift causes too little time for the AccuVote to calibrate or to see the first set of marks as its fed through.  This means that we've got several factors combining together.  I believe we can work around these by knowing what to do both procedurally and in the manufacturing to identify central count units from precinct units.  Factors appear to be:
  • reader throat thickness being too tight for folded ballots in many cases
  • folds themselves being too thick for throat thickness, requiring smoothing
  • variability in some accuVote readers themselves, ie. motor speed, reader sensitivity
  • cut marks on ballots affecting "timing" and reading of critical ballot marks
 
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Tuesday, November 07, 2000 1:51 AM
Subject: Central Count Reader Testing

The following information may be useful in determining future course of action for central count.  The following test was run. 
 
I tried five Lucid readers without shimming (.007 width of ballot paper) using 50% ballots that had been "smoothed" and 50% not smoothed.  Smoothing means that someone takes a smooth blunt object and presses the crease made by the fold.  I then shimmed 5 units.  This is what I noticed:
  • A significant improvement when shimmed, I assume allowing for the timing and the fold dragging on the way thru the machine, affecting how the machine tracks the timing marks thru the machine.
  • The shimmed units were somewhat variable.  That is one machine of the five had consistently higher number of "no ender marks", "calibration errors" etc. with or without smoothing.
  • The "smoothing" process greatly affects the ballots going thru the units smoothly.  The folks in Santa Barbara have accepted this process and seem ok with it.  The "low staffing" sites, such as Humboldt, bristle at the thought of having to manually smooth out the fold on each ballot.  But they may not have a choice. 
Conclusion:  Variability in Lucid readers can be significant.  Folds are a definite contributing factor to thruput.  Shimming for thickness of folds helps in central count.