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.