Relative to your chad dispute with LawDog, please consider the following excerpts from The Boston Sunday Globe (11/26/00) on A-31:
Votomatic Machine Inventor William S. Rouverol:
"William S. Rouverol, who helped design the Votomatic punch card machines in the early 1960s, said that rubber strips behind the ballot, which are meant to clean the perforation from the stylus, can wear out. This, he said, can result in incomplete or slightly bulging perforations.
"The actual hardness of the backing rubber may differ from one column to the next according to the amount of use," Rouverol said in a sworn statement, which was separate from his testimony on Friday before the Palm Beach County canvassing board.
"If the strips are too hard...a chad is less likely to detach from the ballot and pass through the strips," Rouverol said, "resulting in ballots with dimpled or pregnant chads."
He also said that when plastic strips are used instead, as they were in Palm Beach, the problem "could be more severe."
"I do not believe that a voter's inability to punch out chads in one column should hold any bearing on their inability to do so in another column," Rouverol said. "In my opinion, dimpled or pregnant chads, if the only discernable marks for a given race in a given column, should qualify as a vote."
Furthermore, he said that when designing the system, he had considered using the so-called butterfly ballot, as used in Palm Beach. But he decided against it because he thought the setup would "complicate the act of voting" and would lead to more incomplete perforations becausethe chads would build up in one area.
Yale University Statistics Professor Nicholas Hengartner:
Nicholas Hengartner, who is also a statistical consultant for the district attorney's office in New Haven, analyzed the so-called undervotes in 48 Florida counties.
The counties that used optical voting systems registered undervotes in 3 of 1,000 votes, he said. The incidence from punch cards was 15 of 1,000.
"The probability that this fivefolkd increase in the undervote rate can be attributed to chance alone is practically zero, and is less than being hit by lightening five times," Hengartner said. "The odds are even worse in Palm Beach County where 22 of 1,000 voters cast an undervote in the presidential election." |
