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.