Tabulator Troubles in Colorado

More tabulator troubles! In addition to the continuing saga in New York with the tabulator troubles I wrote about earlier, now there is another tabulator-related situation in Colorado. The news report from Saguache County CO is about:

a Nov. 5 “retabulation” of votes cast in the Nov. 2 election Friday by Myers and staff, with results reversing the outcome …

In brief, the situation is exactly about the “tabulation” part of election management, that I have been writing about. To recap:

• In polling places, there are counting devices that count up votes from ballots, and spit out a list of vote-counts for each candidate in each contest, and each option in each referendum. This list is in the form of a vote-count dataset on some removable storage.
• At county election HQ, there are counting devices that count up vote-by-mail ballots and provisional ballots, with the same kind of vote-counts.
• At county election HQ, “tabulation” is the process aggregating these vote-counts and adding them up, to get county-wide vote totals.

In Saguache, election officials did a tabulation run on election night, but the results  didn’t look right. Then on the 5th, they did a re-run on the “same ballots” but the results were different, and it appears to some observers that some vote totals may be been overwritten. Then, on the 8th, with another re-try, a result somewhat like in NY:

… the disc would not load and sent an error message

What this boils down to for me is that current voting system products’ Tabulators are not up to correctly doing some seemingly simple tasks correctly, when operated by ordinary election officials. I am sure they work right in testing situations that include vendor staff; but they must also work right in real life with real users. The tasks include:

• Import an election definition that specifies how many counting devices are being used for each precinct, and how many vote-count datasets are expect from them.
• Import a bunch of vote-count datasets.
• Cross-check to make sure that all expected vote-totals are present, and that there are no un-expected vote-counts.
• Cross-check each vote-count dataset to make sure it is consistent with the election definition.
• If everything cross-checks correctly, add up the counts to get totals, and generate some reports.

That’s not exactly dirt-simple, but it also sounds to me like something that could be implemented in well-designed software that is easy for election officials to use, and easy for observers to understand. And that understanding is critical, because without it, observers may suspect that the election has been compromised, and some election results are wrong. That is a terrible outcome that any election official would work hard to avoid — but it appears that’s what is unfolding in Saguache. Stay tuned …

— EJS

PS: Hats off to the Valley Courier‘s Teresa L. Benns for a really truly excellent news article! I have only touched on some of the issues she covered. Her article has some of the best plain-language explanation of complicated election stuff, that I have ever read. Please take a minute to at least scan her work. – ejs