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Crossover Votes: In the January 2019 exam we [Texas] saw a problem with handling crossover votes after
a straight-party selection.
a straight-party selection.
Adjudication results can be lost: In the January exam, during adjudication of the ballots in the test election, one of the Dominion representatives made a series of mistakes that caused the entire batch of adjudication results to be lost.
Recommendation: Certification should be denied.
Voter May have to Start Over: In January the printer tray became ajar during voting, and the system did not notice until the voter attempted to cast his ballot. The system would not accept the ballot and all the voterâs choices were lost.
According to Dominion representatives, there are eight Windows services that must be started in a certain order; however, the order that steps must be done is not the same as the order they appear on the menus of the Dominion product.
The installation we witnessed took all day.
The installation we witnessed took all day.
Apparently, a mistake was made (accidently skipping one of the reboot steps) and the Dominion representatives, although clearly knowledgeable, were not able to recover.
This was despite telephone consultations with other Dominion experts and the use of a troubleshooting guide that Dominion declined to make available to the examiners. Altogether, the installation took about 8 hours.
Recommendation: Certification should be denied.
Recommendation: Certification should be denied.
Test Voting: During our voting test, we discovered that some party names and proposition text were not displayed, and one scanner was not accepting some ballots. These all turned out to be errors Dominion made in setting up the standard test election used by the Sec of State.
In the case of the scanner, it had accidently been configured not to accept machine-marked ballots. The other problems were caused by leaving some fields empty during election setup, something that the EMS software should not allow, or at least highlight.
Recommendation: Certification should be denied.
Misleading Message: The ballot marking devices incorrectly informed voters that they were casting their ballots, when in fact they were only printing them. Ballots are not be counted until they were scanned on a different device.
Recommendation: Certification should be denied.
Recommendation: Certification should be denied.
Disappearing Message: At one point while scanning ballots, something flashed on the display so briefly we could not read it.
After several attempts to re-scan the ballot, we were able to discern that it was a message reading âAmbiguous Marksâ that was displayed for a second or less. It then reverts to the âSystem Readyâ message.
The voter has no way of knowing what, if anything, is wrong since the error message does not persist long enough to read it.
Furthermore, the message is confusing. It would be better to say something like âCannot read ballot.â
Recommendation: Certification should be denied.
Recommendation: Certification should be denied.
Conclusion:
I cannot recommend certification. Computer systems should be designed to prevent or detect human error whenever possible and minimize the consequences of both human mistakes and equipment failure. Instead the Democracy Suite 5.5-A is fragile and error prone.
I cannot recommend certification. Computer systems should be designed to prevent or detect human error whenever possible and minimize the consequences of both human mistakes and equipment failure. Instead the Democracy Suite 5.5-A is fragile and error prone.
In my opinion it should not be certified for use in Texas.
If certification should be granted, it should be with the condition that all open network and USB ports be sealed.
And thatâs just one analysis for Dominion Voting Software in Texas.
If certification should be granted, it should be with the condition that all open network and USB ports be sealed.
And thatâs just one analysis for Dominion Voting Software in Texas.
