SC Election Commissioners tell Cinci Enq that e-voting has triple redundancy

[mod mom]

A view from South Carolina

Tom Hatfield of Hilton Head Island, S.C., had this to say about the Enquirer's article titled, Voting debate grows partisan:

"I read your article about Touch Screen Voting Machines and have a comment that you may wish to consider since it has not been widely discussed.

"I have been an Election Commissioner for seven years here in Beaufort County, SC (and its Chairman for three of those seven) and was very involved in switching from punch cards, to paper ballot scanning machines to, finally, touch screen machines.

"I cannot remember the source but what was narrowly reported about voting was simply this:

1- There are NO perfect elections. Mistakes are always made. Most often by the voters themselves.
2- The objective was to reduce whatever errors are made, whether by election officials or voters, to the lowest possible number.
3- The error rates of voting by ballot types are proven to be:
a) Hand counted ballots - over 3 percent (which are also the easiest to cheat).
b) Punch cards - 2 to 3 percent (including hanging chads).
c) Electronic scanned paper ballots - 1 percent (mostly voter error).
d) Touch Screen Voting - 0.5 percent (the most difficult to defraud with the least voter error).

"What is also not well publicized is that most electronic voting machines have a triple redundancy. Which means that you have two EPROM electronic chips built inside the machine that records every vote cast on that machine. Plus a removable 'smart card' that records the same votes. If one fails for any reason, the other two are available for backup and verification.

-SNIP

http://frontier.cincinnati.com/blogs/gov/default.asp

PLEASE LEAVE COMMENTS, IT CAN BE DONE ANONYMOUSLY!

[yourout]

1. Either wilfully ignorant or lieing his ass off.

[WillYourVoteBCounted]

2. the redundant memories don't always match

The redundant memories on these Direct Record Voting machines don't always match, and the ES&S manual even points that out. The new report by the Florida Fair Elections explains this.

See "Sarasota's Vanished Votes - An Investigation into the Cause of Uncounted Votes in the 2006 Congressional District 13 Race in Sarasota County, Florida" January 2008 www.FloridaFairElections.org

4.7.7 "Redundant" Machine Memories Do Not Always Match

The ES&S Operator's Manual states (Page 72):
The voter terminals store all voted ballot images in three separate
memory chips. Each
of those chips contains a complete record of all ballots that were cast on
that voter terminal. Whenever a voter terminal powers up (each time a
voter begins using it), the images in those three chips are compared to
each other. If they are not identical, the voter terminal issue an error
message on the display and then powers down to prevent further use.
This prevents large amounts of corrupt data from being stored or
transferred in the system.

One thing that became clear from the diagnosis of the Miami-Dade problem in
2003-2004 was that the three internal memories of an iVotronic machine may
not always match under certain conditions. Since each of these memories holds
vote totals ("a complete record of all ballots that were cast on that voter
terminal"), it appears to be possible for one memory to hold one set of vote
totals while another memory in the same machine holds a different set of vote
totals...


http://www.floridafairelections.org/reports/Vanishing_Votes.pdf (pages 45-46)

[mod mom]

3. There's some informative comments left. Thanks to any of you who contributed.

:hi: