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It is almost certainly a hardware problem
with the machine. You should send
the unit to There has been at least one other report
of a soft reboot that I am aware of, from Tari. It appears to be a rare occurrence, or the
problem is underreported. It will
be interesting to see the stats from today once we are through. Note that under CE 2.12 the system after
soft reboot will come back up as if nothing happened. Under 3.0, an error message will appear
when the machine comes back up after soft-reboot, and the poll worker will have
to hard-reboot the machine. That
is, under CE 3.0, the poll worker is at least given a chance to see the problem
and issue the voter another voter access card if necessary. -----Original Message----- Friends: I need to offer a written explanation of
the reason this "soft-boot" occurred (see client comments after
Ken's). Since this resulted in a
voter's vote not being cast and we have no feasible way of knowing which voter
this was, my client has requested a letter of explanation. Can I have a "technical
layman"'s explanation of this event?
Thanks. Les Additional Comments From
Ken Clark 2002-10-28 16:29
RCR#2196
Improve critical error recovery from soft reboot
[There is really no hope
of reproducing this. Instead of
listing as a bug, I am making a venue change to RCR/enhancement with a
different summary.] The worst part about this is that the voter walked
away without having their vote counted.
We have to prevent this at all costs. Lets assume the analysis below is accurate (it sounds
pretty plausible). Here are a few
concrete improvements to the software that could help: 1.
We should write a
‘token’ to nonvolatile storage (flash) when we accept a voter card. When the voter casts their ballot, we
delete the token. At power up, the
software checks for the token and knows we crashed (for whatever reason) during
voting if one is there. Then we
could log the event more accurately.
We could also force poll worker intervention when the unit comes back
up, so humans are aware of the problem at the point that it happens. 2.
At power up, right now we just
unilaterally eject an inserted card without fanfare and without even reading
it. This isn’t good
enough. We should read the card,
log that there was a card in the machine at boot, and log the details of the
card. Then we should pop up an
error message and require poll worker intervention. Ideally we would include some audio clues that a poll
worker could hear as well, but alas the current internal speaker isn’t up
to the task. If we had something like the above, then at least the
poll workers would have known about the problem and could have issued the voter
a new card and asked him/her to vote again. November
5, 2002 Advance Voting-Johnson County, Kansas Here is the scenario: A voter inserted their voter card in a
touchscreen. Somehow the voter card was ejected without the cast ballot being
pushed...immediately after the machine audit tape indicates that the machine was
rebooted - however, the machine was never turned off and on. The Supervising Judge (SJ) has the only
key and has instructions to not turn the machines off if
there is a reported problem.
They know to just close the lid and call our office. That location has had several of the problem machines this
time and the SJ has been following those instructions. Our internal brainstorming leads us to this
conclusion. Because of the voter receipt and the date and time stamp in ESM
(voter registration system) for the computerized voter checking we are able to
determine which voter experienced this problem. It is an elderly voter - we telephoned the voter to do
a "voter satisfaction survey" - they loved the system and placed their
voter card in the plastic container and received their "I Voted"
sticker on the way out. This leads us to believe that the voter's ballot appeared on the
screen - the precinct was validated to the voter receipt by the machine
judge and the voter receipt was placed in the brown envelope for that
voting machine. Sometime during voting, the machine did an internal reboot and
ejected the voter card to the voter.
The voter is elderly and simply took the card and placed it in the container and left. The machine log indicates that the vote
was not cast and that the machine was turned back on. The SJ did not open the swinging door and turn the machine off and on. I am concerned about this - can you check with your software folks and get an
answer for us. This appears to be something like a soft reboot happening
within the machine which triggers the voter card to eject just like
physically turning the machine off and on or pushing the Cast Ballot
button. As you will recall, we had several instances in August where the machine
ejected the voter card after the voter voted for just one candidate. We understand that this problem was also reported by other jurisdictions in
their September primaries. We need your assistance to problem solve this one. Thanks..Connie ______________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Lesley Koop Thompson |