SOS Official Defends Iowa Certification
A top officer for the Iowa Secretary of State (SOS) has emailed me a defense of the voting machine certification that occurred January 30. I reported on the meeting here and more specifically here. During the certification process a volunteer voter named Penelope had used an Automark ballot marking computer. With its help she had filled out a ballot that she was unable to see due to her visual impairment.
Sandy Steinbach, who represented the SOS at the meeting, notes that “The ballot was produced correctly, even though the device required re-booting after the anomaly occurred,” as I indicated in my story.
She goes on:
“The situation has been explained to me as the AutoMARK receiving information that it could not process. Because of this, it shut itself down.”
Of course the only information the machine receives is the voter’s choice of which candidates to mark, and processing those votes correctly is the machine’s only role on election day. I don’t think Penelope did anything malicious. She was merely trying out equipment she had never encountered before. And the ballot was indeed marked. But the machine froze in the process.
Steinbach continues:
“AutoMARK has a special role in the election process. This device does not count ballots; it marks them. The ballot will be counted by an optical scan counting device.
It is not unusual for state certification testing to raise concerns that were not seen in the ITA [independent testing authority] process. We are looking at the devices in a somewhat different way from the ITA process. The fact that the anomaly was discovered and is being corrected is a good thing. That is why we do the tests. We will prepare instructions for our election officials, so they can be prepared if this rare event happens on election day.”
Let’s hope it is a rare event. But in the January 30 test only a few ballots were created on the Automark machine. This rare event occurred on the very first ballot. The vendor’s representative acknowledged something similar had happened in Illinois tests. So is it really rare? Voters may have to find out for themselves.