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The following symptoms (BUGS??) were found in Central Count in
Marin:
Somehow, we're (Tab and I) not sure how, but two decks of the
27 absentee decks that were processed in Marin had "corrupted" totals. Here's
what happened in a nut shell.
1. I was having problems at the very end of the day on
Wed. and got about 12 ballots that read "not in precinct". These
were from decks 18 and 21. Decks 19 and 20 were aborted, I can't
remember why.
2. Today, before I left I previewed a summary report and
noticed that there was a 550 ballot difference between the ballots cast and the
votes counted totals.
3. I previewed another summary report with overvotes,
blanks, and undervotes, and showed 540 or so overvoted ballots. I knew
this could not be correct as I'd been looking at the ballots and knew that not
too many ballots were overvoted for President (which is the primary race I'd
been looking at).
4. I assumed (wrongly) that the score and fold on the
absentee was being picked up by the AccuVote, and called Frank/Tab. We
determined we could turn on the "overvote" filter and recount the ballots.
5. While this was going on, I called back Madelyn in
Marin and asked her to print an entire summary of all blank, over, and under for
all races. When she did we determined that all propostions showed almost
the identical number of overvotes. In other words, in some
precincts, all 27 propositions on the ballot showed 13 overvotes (the
numbers would vary by precinct). This took away the possiblility of reading
folds.
6. Tab received email of db and determined that if
a precinct showed overvotes, it showed the same number of overvotes for all
races. Confusion reigned for about 45 minutes until he did search
which showed results of overvotes by deck. All overvotes were
in central count decks 18 and 21.
Summary; we don't know yet how this happened. Is
it two AccuVotes at the end of the day all clogged with poorly fused
ink that saw overvotes in all three columns on the back
of the ballot?? This seems very doubtful, as we'd be getting many "invalid
precinct" and other messages which we didn't. It appears that central
count somehow got confused or the AccuVote got confused and stored incorrect
results for about 600 ballots in these two decks. We all need to keep this
in mind and check to make sure that our decks are counting logically. Stay
tuned and hopefully Tab will have further info on this. But in the mean
time, you need to check and verify that your over, under, blank counts don't
look weird. At this point we don't know what else to do. Tab is there
anything else you can think of to help us identify this as we go??
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