Puerto Rico Election

The recount is done and it was a success. We counted 69,554 ballots approximately in 3.5 days with 11 machines/stations running 8-hour days.
This time included opening ballot cases, checking for improperly marked ballots and hand counting those, processing the good ones, filling up a combine report, and then placing materials back into case to start a new case. Two people operated each station.

The total Election Day count was about 96,500 approximately. This means that approximately 27,000 were hand counted. The major reason was due to the fact that poll workers have a custom of signing each and every ballot as a watermark per say to insure that no one has introduced an illegal copy of the ballot into the ballot box. I presume that this is a carry over of the bygone days were ballots could be easily copied. But the fact still remains that they do sign or initial each ballot. Even though they were told where to sign we still received many that were signed across our timing marks preventing the central count machines from reading them. This will probably account for 40% of the hand counted ballots.
The second problem was that the printer ran a batch of ballots that were either dirty, (due to ink ghosting), and or cut too large and were not be processed by our machines. This will probably turn out to be about 30% of the hand counted ballots. The balance of the 30% contained improperly marked ballots. Again this is an estimate.

If a central count machine looses power can the firmware or maybe a memory card hold the server IP address instead of asking the operator to indicate the server IP via buttons before you can linkup to server? Basically customer proof it so that on power up it automatically logs on to server and it proceeds with the counting of ballots. Also, do not ask if we would like to use the feeder or to re-circulate ballots unless you go to supervisory functions and you manually change the defaults. It could be that this is done if you leave a memory card in each machine, but I just do not know at this time. We sure could have used this feature…

Other than the fact that someone accidentally kicked our power feed cable and having AccuVote ‘s die on me after running down the batteries, the occasional brown out and total power failure for a few hours, we did extremely well.

We feel very optimistic that we will move on to the next step of the selling cycle and eventually receiving an order from this account. And by all of the observations and comments of our seasoned sales staff they also seem to concur with this observation.