Last week Dr. Shvartsman of the UConn VoTeR Center released a report on Pre-Election testing of memory cards, that report showed 3.5% of the memory cards had “Junk Data” (the cards could not be read) and that many election officials had difficulty following pre-election testing procedures.
This week Dr. Shvartsman released another Post-Election study of 100 cards collected for evaluation after the election. These cards were not randomly selected. The results were similar to pre-election testing with more “Junk Data” cards at 8%. <read>
Once again we appreciate the work of the Secretary of the State’s Office and Dr. Shvartsman’s team in implementing this program. We have much sympathy for election officials who had difficulty complying with the program this time as procedures were added close to the election. We have no sympathy for LHS Associates. Two things seem clear:
- We should expect that compliance with procedures by election officials will improve dramatically over each of the elections in 2008, making this program a unique and valuable addition to election security
- We should be very very disappointed with the performance of LHS in quality control — with years of experience programming elections in other New England states — they should have met commitments to Connecticut to provide tested cards to Connecticut municipalities. There is no reason to give them a pass for the November 2007 election.
The report was released at an 11:00am press conference at the Secretary of the State’s office. Also available at the conference was a yet to be posted analysis of the post-election audits by the VoTeR Center. The data presented was generally consistent with the data compiled and reported by the Coalition. We will cover that report when it is released in its final form.
