Registrar of Voters
Election Integrity/Voter Confidence Subcommittee Meeting
Tuesday, February 13 2007
Minutes
The Election Integrity/voter Confidence Subcommittee met on Tuesday, February 13th at 4:30 p.m. present were: Linda Bagnashi-Dorrance, Cat Woods, Bob Roberts and John Ortega. Also present were Michael Smith and Elaine Ginnold and Kenny Mostern
Kenny Mostern from True Ballot spoke about and demonstrated the vote counting system he uses to conduct union, assessment district and homeowners elections. The system uses off-the-shelf equipment and goes by the vote counting rules of the entity for which the election is being conducted. The ballots in this system are digitally scanned. The scanned ballot images can be reviewed on a screen and recounted after the election. Subcommittee discussed the possibility of using this as an audit mechanism to supplement the 1% manual recount after the election; however it appears that state law does not permit opening the ballot boxes to rescan the ballots unless there is a recount request. If this type of an audit were permitted, we would present the idea to the full Election Advisory Committee.
ROV reported that a high-speed central scanner for its voting system has not yet been certified, but if and when it is, the department will decide at that time whether or not to purchase it.
Update on election department reorganization – Michael Smith reported that his recommendation has been to separate the ROV dept. from the Treasurer’s Dept., but there has been no action on this as yet.
Advance notification of ROV items on Board agenda – Elaine Ginnold told committee that the board agenda is published by the Thursday before each board meeting and should be available on line. If there is an ROV item on the agenda, she will notify the advisory committee.
Input into voting machine/equipment purchases – The Registrar of Voters solicited input from organizations serving persons with disabilities before purchasing its AutoMark units. The department would ask for input from community groups, including the Election Advisory Committee, in the event that there is another voting system purchase planned in the future.
Committee briefly discussed the risks and benefits of mail voting and decided to ask the USPS to send a representative to speak about mail security at a future meeting and to continue the discussion of AV voting to the next subcommittee meeting.
Committee decided to change its meeting date to the first Wed. of each month at 4:00 p.m.
There being no further business, the meeting adjourned at 5:50 p.m. The next meeting will be on Wednesday, March 7 at 4:00 p.m.
Quote from the meeting: “Good technology and good public vigilance are necessary to have good, accurate elections.”