6. Dopp: Makes post election data and exit poll
analysis much more difficult to perform
To date, IRV election can make it easier to do
post-election and exit poll analysis. Because
optical scan counts with IRV require capturing
of ballot images, San Francisco (CA) and
Burlington (VT) were able to release the data
files showing every single ballot's set of
rankings thereby allowing any voter to do a
recount and full analysis on their own.
Exit polls can be done just as well under IRV
rules as vote-for-one rules. California requires
a manual audit in its elections, which has been
done without difficulty in San Franciscos IRV
elections. Manual audits should be required for
all elections, regardless of whether IRV is used or not.
This is stuff and nonsense. As I just pointed out
in the last post, the Opscan machines in San
Francisco do *not* provide images of the ballots,
they are preprocessed and modified, they do not
show all rankings on the ballot. I've proposed
that genuine images be made available. It's a lot
of data, but not nearly as much as might be
thought. A fax-quality image of a ballot might
be, say, 10KB, compressed. So with a million
voters, we'd be looking at 10 GB of data for the
whole election. The images could be captured with
digital cameras, independently, by election
observers, so there could be multiple redundant
collections of ballot images. I'm pretty sure
that media would take those images and do their
own automatic image recognition on them, but if
the ballots were serialized in some way (and they
must be for the promise of being able to verify
the images with the paper ballots), voters could
look at a tolerable number of images and verify
that their tabulation of the votes in those
images matched the ones in an official count or
what other voters have tabulated. But that's not
what we have. Nor do I expect that we will get it
from government. We'll have to do it ourselves.
In Florida, it's explicitly legal to photograph
the ballots. Should be everywhere.
FairVote is distorting the truth about those
images. Yes, OpScan equipment captures images of
ballots, but they apparently don't store those
images, they process them into abstracted vote
data, which is what SF calls "images." It means
analyzed votes from a single ballot. And they
processed out data considered irrelevant for
election purposes, but very relevant for
determining voter error rates by analyzing the exact form of errors.
Now, as to exit polls. It is obvious that exit
polls get more complex with IRV, or any
preferential ballot system, because more
questions need to be asked. It's not enough, any
more, to ask "who did you vote for?" Exit polls
are important as a check on official results.
Properly done, they can detect certain kinds of
fraud, then leading, hopefully, to more detailed
examination of the ballots or election processes.
Unfortunately, what we have seen, with heavy
dependence on automated equipment, is high
reluctance to investigate election fraud, which
can be pretty difficult with some voting
equipment. The paper ballot systems that San
Francisco is using, though, are much better than
the worst. If someone actually does audit the
results. And that gets more complicated with IRV.
More to the point, if errors are found, what is
done with that? Errors in counting IRV ripple
through the rounds. An error in counting the
first round can require the entire election to be
recounted, i.e,. *all the precincts,* and *all
the rounds.* Which was weeks of work, with
election workers putting in 16-hour days, in San Francisco last year.
Simple, easy for election officials? Yeah, right.
Continued with:
Dopp: 7. Difficult and time-consuming to manually count
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