The Independent View: NYC Council Meeting About Election Process

Yesterday I attended a 5 hour meeting, Oversight - Assessing the Board of Elections’ Performance in the 2012 Congressional Primary Election and Preparedness for the Upcoming 2012 New York State Primary Election.

The main part of the meeting was a review of what happened in the June 26, 2012 Congressional Primary that resulted in a large change in preliminary votes that showed, Congressman Rangel wining by over 20,000 votes, but after hand counting the ballots, by just under 1,000 votes.

Part of the reason is the archaic hand entering of hand calculated number by the poll worker from optical scanners paper tapes that already have the results on flash 4gb. drives called PDM. Than hand entered by police employees into a database that is transmitted to AP for media distribution.

The new system is just as odd:

1. When the scanner's are closed, they print 3 copies of the result tapes, and write the result to 2 PDMs.

2. A police officer will take one copy of the tape and PDM to one of the 74 local precincts.

3. At the precinct, the PDM would be read into a laptop by BOE employees and transmit the PDM data to police headquarters.

4. At police headquarters, the combined vote totals would then be converted into a XML file format and transmitted to AP over land lines.

For me, this only will get possible incorrect totals to the AP and the public, quicker.

Example, in the Bronx there is a known problem with scanners overheating during the day and not counting votes and with no indication of an error. Currently the poll is instructed to periodically to take scanners off-line to cool down. The error is only found when the paper ballot is hand counted in an audit or court reported hand-count.

So this new report process will take possible bad data on the PDM and get it to AP quicker.