Curiouser and curiouser, the Grand Junction Sentinel reports:
Elections officials in Mesa and Jefferson counties have tried without success to duplicate difficulties found in the counties’ electronic-voting equipment, difficulties that resulted last month in decertification of the equipment.
Colorado Secretary of State Mike Coffman decertified the equipment made by Omaha, Neb.-based ES&S after optical scanners made by the company failed to reach a 10,000-vote counting threshold and officials said they detected a glitch that resulted in problems with touch-screen voting equipment when a magnet was placed in a specific location on the equipment.
“We’ve been trying to break the equipment, Jefferson County has been trying to break the equipment, ES&S has been trying to break the equipment” to no avail, Mesa County Clerk Janice Rich said Monday. “We even took a welding magnet to it.” [Pols emphasis]
Elections officials in Mesa County spent the weekend trying to spot the problems that testing by the Secretary of State’s Office found, Rich said.
“We’ve been unable to replicate the problems the Secretary of State’s Office said they found,” said Josh Liss, elections deputy for the Jefferson County Clerk’s Office. “In every instance the equipment is performing as it should.”
Rich said she hoped this week to put her equipment to the test of counting 10,000 ballots. The only thing stopping that was having 10,000 ballots to count, she said.
Of course the Premier Election machines, the only ones to survive Coffman’s “testing” and (coincidentally) the only ones represented by Coffman’s friends at Phase Line Strategies, LLC, are working fine too by all accounts…
As Colorado’s voting troubles make national headlines, it’s tough to imagine how this could look any worse for Coffman. With the legislature convening tomorrow and the counties demanding answers now, how does he plan to explain nobody else being able to replicate these failures?
You must be logged in to post a comment.
BY: 2Jung2Die
IN: Weekend Open Thread
BY: SSG_Dan
IN: Weekend Open Thread
BY: JohnInDenver
IN: Weekend Open Thread
BY: JohnNorthofDenver
IN: Friday Jams Fest
BY: Duke Cox
IN: Dems Save The Day, Government To Stay Open
BY: Gilpin Guy
IN: Weld County Gerrymandering Case Pushes The Boundaries Of Home Rule
BY: SSG_Dan
IN: Friday Jams Fest
BY: notaskinnycook
IN: Friday Jams Fest
BY: bullshit!
IN: Friday Jams Fest
BY: 2Jung2Die
IN: Friday Open Thread
Subscribe to our monthly newsletter to stay in the loop with regular updates!
When Coffman was co-opting Ken Gordon’s message regarding the need for a post-partisan SoS. The Coffman supporters assuring us that Mike was a good, ethical, honest man.
But a magnetic clamp to hold two pieces of steel together.
But that’s pretty good, they are quite powerful. I’d wager that your hard drive wouldn’t like one nearby……
Then someone needs to go back and conditionally re-certify them.
Gilpin County doesn’t have 10,000 voters. If everyone showed up at one vote center and voted, we’d still be below the threshold.
that no one really has a good answer here. Rule number 1 in science, an experiment must be repeatable by others to be considered valid.
But based on what has come out from the Boulder County Clerk, I’m not sure the clerk’s offices fully understand all of this either.
I do know that having architected, designed, managed, and coded tons of enterprise software, that while what we do is good enough for banks, it’s not good enough for airplanes, medical equipment, nuclear reactors, or voting.
– dave
The Rocky Mountain News is reporting that Coffman has decided to back track on the decertification of Denver’s equipment, due to “errors” in the process.
At this point, he might as well put on a funny helmet and ride in a tank…
http://www.rockymountainnews.c…
Coffman clearly has no idea that he has no idea what he is doing. They actually have done studies and have found people who are incompetent at something tend to thing they are well above average at that task. They don’t know enough to realize that they are clueless.
Those who question their own abilities are more likely to be doing a decent job.
I just talked to my County Clerk and Recorder, and she gave me the details on the system we use that has been decertified: the Hart eScan.
The eScan was apparently decertified because of the way it handles stray marks. The eScan is very sensitive to stray marks and will reject the ballot as an overvote if it detects one; this is a known issue, and a software update may resolve it – we’ll know shortly.
In the meantime, decertifying the machine because it counts too many stray marks is somewhat extreme: these are precinct-level scanners, and an overvote is immediately rejected back to the voter for correction (or, worst-case, a replacement ballot). Absentee ballots are reviewed by a Board to minimize this issue as well.
So – one machine decertified because it can’t count past 10,000 (in situations where it might never reach 10,000), another decertified because it asks voters to keep their ballots clean, and the SoS now backpedaling and re-certifying machines due to a “glitch” in the process. I’m not overly impressed with the audit process so far.