Blog Article
On the first day of early voting, Monday, October 21, there were widespread problems with the ES&S E-Pollbooks used in Dallas County to check in voters at voting centers. The turnout on the first day of early voting was heavy (long lines) and the e-pollbook problems contributed to even longer lines.
The problems resulted in the election workers being kicked off the system, frequently requiring new logins every time it happened. The problems occurred every 2 to 10 voters, so this issue consumed a lot of time for the election workers. Worse, as a direct artifact of the core problem, the incorrect ballot style (wrong precinct and/or sub-precinct) and its races being printed for some (but not all) voters. When noticed by election workers or voters, this required spoiling the incorrect ballots and generating new ones. In some cases, this required multiple cycles to generate a correct ballot which consumed more time. One Voting Center reported a total of over 200 spoiled ballots on Monday. For these voters, they ultimately cast corrected ballots but this error caused more time and resulted in even longer lines.
Fortunately, these problems were quickly noticed by our Election Workers (Election Judges and Election Clerks) and reported to DCED. The problem was diagnosed and its causes and effects were found an fixed.
A more complete background of the problem and its fix are included in the Dallas County Elections Department press release (see below).
Overnight, a software update for the e-pollbooks was made by ES&S and pushed by DCED to all e-pollbooks in the county. On early Tuesday morning, Election Judges were instructed to do a power-on reset to invoke the updated software.
The update apparently fixed the reported problems and Voting Centers operated all Tuesday without these three issues reoccurring on Tuesday.
The much-discussed prior testing of the voting systems didn't catch this problem, likely because the testing process would have required a much larger sample at volumes similar to full production of actual voting operations. Therefore, it went undetected prior to a full load on the system at real-world volumes.
There may be more as-yet-undetected issues that will arise with the ES&S e-pollbooks in this voting cycle, so we are remaining vigilant.
Points Out Need for a Best Practice
The problems pointed out in this incident provide an excellent example of why a very good practice all voters should perform: PROOF YOUR BALLOT BEFORE PUTTING IT INTO THE VOTE TABULATOR.
Your ballot isn’t cast until it runs through the vote tabulator to be scanned. Until your ballot is read by the vote tabulator, you can still check it and make any required changes to conform to your wishes. You have all the time you need to perform this important proof.
The current voting process used in Dallas County is designed to allow a final proof check before casting your ballot.
After your raw ballot is created in the check-in process, you put the raw ballot into the ballot markup device where your selection for each race is made and, when finished, printed onto the raw ballot in two places: (1) a machine-readable bar code, plus (2) a human-readable name of each race. As your marked-up ballot comes out of the markup device, your vote has not yet been cast. Your vote won’t be counted until you feed your marked-up ballot into the vote tabulator where it is scanned and tabulated.
This deliberate gap before tabulation gives you the opportunity to perform a final proof of your ballot before casting it!
At the very bottom of the front of the marked-up ballot, you will find the human-readable selections you have made showing how you voted for each race. The type is small but should be readable. If you notice anything that isn’t correct, ask an Election Judge to spoil (cancel) your uncast ballot and generate a new raw ballot for marking it up again.
Proofing your ballot is standard best practice but not all voters perform this simple task. We STRONGLY recommend that you proof your ballot before casting it!
Background on Software Update
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