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.