“We’ve Never Had To Do This Before.”
Rewriting software is not for beginners. But what if your ballot counter is misbehaving? Should you reprogram it? Even in the middle of a public certification meeting?
They did it Monday in the Iowa Secretary of State’s office. Election Systems and Software of Omaha was there to gain official approval of its new equipment. But after they had used the new ballot marking gadget to mark some ballots for a test election, the ballot scanner made a mistake in the tally.
The scanner reads and counts those paper ballots at the speed of light. It can be quite reliable if the ballots are properly marked and the scanner is carefully calibrated and correctly programmed. But the scanner must know the rules for counting and that can be tricky.
Now this ballot scanner was not really being tested Monday, according to the folks in the room. It was indeed on the agenda, but it had also been tested and approved last year before the newest gadget for handicapped voters was for sale. Today it was needed to read and count the ballots created by the new gadget because the examiners wanted to see that those new ballots were actually decipherable by the M100 counter.
So it wasn’t the new gadget that was tripping up the older scanner, it was the programming in the scanner. Apparently this particular test ballot had not been tried during the earlier approval process. So now, what to do?
Phone home. The ES & S men called Omaha to see what could be done. It was decided to “burn new media,” thus reprogramming the scanner on the spot. The chair of the board of examiners observed “We’ve never had to do this before. We’ve never had to reprogram.”
About an hour later the technician stuck a memory card into the M100 and tried the small stack of ballots again. Success.
When I told software tester John Washburn about this by email later, he wrote back:
WHAT!! …REPROGRAMMED WHILE WE WAITED…!!
Calmer now. Pulse returning to normal.
Calm blue oceans.
Breathe in, Breathe out.
This stark response prompted me to ask another question: Were they tampering with already certified equipment when they reprogrammed the machine? He said, “Yes.”
What have we learned from this? We know the ballot scanner worked on Monday. It did what it was told by the software it was using. We know that you can’t really tell what is in the software. We know it is easily changed if the vote count is not going to your liking.
But we can also wonder a few things. Do election officials know what constitutes tampering with their equipment? Who do they trust to mess with the programming? Do some Iowa counties now have in their possession brand new equipment that is programmed to improperly count some ballots?
Just wondering.