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| 6-3-08: Tech-oriented 'Storm Spotters... |
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| Author |
Message |
    
Bev Harris
Board Administrator
Username: Admin
Post Number: 8298
Registered: 12-2004
Best of Black Box? 
Votes: 3 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Tuesday, June 3, 2008 - 10:32 am: | 
|
COMING SOON: The Jim March report on Monterey
STILL HOT, HOT, HOT: Three fledgling new tools are available for election protection:
SUMMARY (Details follow, scroll down)
1) Results watchers: AUTOMATIC UPDATING techniques, called "Web site mirroring" or "offline browsing" -- Will automatically capture every change on Web sites you want to monitor. How-to tips from extraordinary volunteer John Howard, see below.
2) Tech Patriots: WEB SNAPSHOT tool - Tool to automatically capture and extract incoming results data from CNN and government results sites. If you have been tracking results, you may have noticed that clicking county by county for updates is inefficient -- the "Web Snapshot" tool developed by Donovan Levinson is designed to automate data collection and speed analysis. The (hit or miss) county precinct data can provide live-time detail data. Program code, see below.
3) Stats people: County by county spreadsheets identifying voting systems, voter registration numbers, past voting histories, and more. Drawn from Secretary of State Websites and Election Assistance Commission data tables. See below for links.
BACKGROUND, WHY THESE TOOLS ARE IMPORTANT:
Today, South Dakota and Montana have presidential primaries. Many more states have primary elections for local, state, and federal office. Nowhere near enough citizens with analytical skills are monitoring June 3, and November will have over 5,000 jurisdictions rolling in at once, so if you have analytical and/or computer skills and you care about fair elections, what are you waiting for? Jump in!
Thanks to new tools provided to Black Box Voting by citizen volunteers Levinson and Howard, you can be more efficient. If you are tech-savvy, please try out the tools, volunteer a bit of your time, and if you can improve on the tools or invent additional ones, have at it.
ELECTION STORM SPOTTERS -- BEAT THE CLOCK
Anomaly-spotting SPEED is a huge part of the election protection challenge. Wrong results only have to make it through Election Night, post-election activities, and certification of election and then it's all over. Use the June 3 election, including the updates that will roll in during the next 10 days, and follow each new election -- regardless of what state it's in -- to practice and refine your ability to spot problems quickly.
You can post what you find in real time at Black Box Voting so other citizens can get to work on other aspects, like communicating to the press, to candidates, requesting public records, or legal actions.
When votes are counted in secret on computers that government insiders control, citizens can't know whether results are legitimate, but we CAN identify results that are illegitimate! So let's get busy on that.
Look for:
- Impossible times and dates
- Impossible numbers
- Results that go down midstream
- Two plus two equals five
- Results come in too early, before polls close
- Results start and then stop, with a trend reversal after the lag
- Delayed results
- More votes than voters
- Late precincts that produce a trend change
- Omitted information
- Obstruction of information
- Insufficient randomness (example, same number of votes for several candidates)
- Zero votes when there should be some
- Some votes where there should be zero
OVERVIEW OF TOOL KIT 2008:
In the new Black Box Voting 2008 Tool Kit, we will ask you to match your skill sets to one or more of five categories to help protect Election 2008. Are you a ...
1. Networker (connect with people, organize, gather citizens to action)
2. Empowerer (provide financial support, donate laptops, video cameras, travel miles)
3. Hunter-Gatherer (collect assigned, strategic information using the Internet and public records)
4. Analyzer (Crunch numbers, harvest election-related data, create tools to improve efficiency)
5. Communicator (connect important information with blogs, mainstream media, public officials, and enforcement authorities)
ANALYZERS, THIS ONE'S FOR YOU
Now is the time to start flagging anomalies so that citizens who are Communicators can practice getting the word out. New results will be rolling in all week. Play with the tools (which are in early stages of development), post your findings, and if you feel inspired, invent new tools for the next round.
ANOMALY EXAMPLES:
Up until just before 5 pm our time [Pacific] Jefferson County [KY] was at 89% reporting and Barack had 113,000+ votes. At 5:03 our time or 8:03 KY time the number of precincts reporting dropped to 86% and Barack's number of votes dropped to 64,489 - his % of votes is approximately the same."
"It only took until the 5th ward in Allegheny County [PA] to find a false result. Two reform ballots were cast when only one reform voter is registered. This mystery reformer ballot cast happens with a fair amount of regularity." "A better question is why there were any at all, since this is a closed primary."
Barnstead, New Hampshire, January presidential primary: Registered Democratic voters plus same-day Dem registrations plus unaffiliated voters requesting Democratic ballot: 674. Number of Democratic ballots cast: 917.
Allentown 1st Ward 1st District [PA] which is duplicated (odd) however truly unusual is the reporting time of 10:03 AM. Isn't 10:03AM a bit early for reporting results?
Vigo County [IN], 2008 primary, results were up on CNN nearly one-half hour before the polls closed.
NON-TECHIES: EXIT HERE
Entering technical zone...Here are details and links for the Tools:
quote:From John Howard:
WEB SITE MIRRORING (also called offline browsing) -- There are numerous products out there. One is called HTtrack and, with Windows, you use the windows version called WinHTTrack. It's a free open-source product and can be found at http://www.httrack.com/page/2/en/index.html
It can be configured to copy an entire web-site (definitely NOT a good idea), it can also be configured to copy a set of specific links contained in an HTML file, which is why I create the state by state "Compendium" link pages in advance - that way I can get the results pages from multiple jurisdictions, without having to spend a lot of time entering and re-entering the links I want captured. (my fall-2006 file captured just over 1200 selected precincts and counties in 11 states plus a couple of news sites, in each of about 20 readings throughout the evening)
Pre-requisites for gathering election night results:
- A reliable fast internet connection (NOT dial up)
- LOTS and LOTS and LOTS of disk space
- Someone to babysit the process and start it every so often. (I like starting every 15 minutes)
There are options - I exclude any graphics, limit the capture to 5 simultaneous connections, do not cache the files, and set a maximum external link depth of 1. This prevents the program from finding additional links and trying to copy them too.
Usually a couple of dry runs are needed to make sure that you're getting the files you want without too much extra 'stuff'. During a night of result gathering, I also update my source file with new links as they become available. If available, using a second computer to gather and update your source file is worthwhile.
Do a bit of experimenting with the program first to familiarize yourself with it.
Here are some of the "Compendium" link files created by John Howard for the 2008 primaries:
Indiana: http://www.bbvforums.org/docs/tools/IndianaCountiesV4.htm
Oregon: http://www.bbvdocs.org/OR/state/Oregon-74022.htm
South Dakota: http://www.bbvforums.org/docs/tools/SouthDakotaCounties.html
2) WEB SNAPSHOT
A tool prepared by extraordinary citizen Donovan Levinson. In the course of just a few days, Levinson developed four versions, each with additional features. Interwoven into the developing versions are tips and instructions, so I'm going to provide versions 1.0, 2.0, 2.1, and 2.2 in order with instructions and tips that came with each.
Here they are, in order, with notes as posted at the time:
quote:
1.0: first release of the WebSnapshot tool. Version 1.0: http://www.bbvforums.org/docs/tools/WebSnapshot-1.0.jar
(18 KB)
2.0: Added CNN support http://www.bbvforums.org/docs/tools/WebSnapshot-2.0.jar
(27 KB)
2.1: Added CNN exit poll support http://www.bbvforums.org/docs/tools/WebSnapshot-2.1.zip
(49 KB)
2.2: Added data collection for South Dakota counties http://www.bbvforums.org/docs/tools/WebSnapshot-2.2.zip
(52 KB)
2.2.1: Add a time out when downloading URLs
since the CERS URLs sometimes hang
http://www.bbvforums.org/docs/tools/WebSnapshot-2.2.1.zip(53 KB)
VERSION 1.0 NOTES, GENERAL USE
http://www.bbvforums.org/docs/tools/WebSnapshot-1.0.jar
Usage: java -jar WebSnapshot.jar <urls> [<refresh> <count>]
Where <urls> is the path to a file containing URLs, one on each line. The <refresh> and <count> arguments are optional. The <count> is the number of snapshots to create, and the <refresh> is the number of seconds to wait between each snapshot. Here's an example URLs file:
http://www.cnn.com/
http://www.yahoo.com/
MV "BARACK OBAMA" "HILLARY CLINTON" http://www.lakecountyin.org/cms-host/voters/microvote/2008PrimaryElectionResults /LakePrecSumm561.htm
The last line in the file is a special notation for downloading all the precinct summaries for an entire county. The notation for this is:
MV "CANDIDATE 1" "CANDIDATE 2" "..." <url>
Where <url> is the path to the last precinct in the county. The example above downloads all 561 precinct summaries and produces a csv file with results per precinct.
Example usage:
java -jar WebSnapshot.jar urls.txt 60 5
This would create a snapshot folder based on current date/time and then capture each of the URLs contained in urls.txt. It would then wait for 60 seconds and repeat the process, taking a total of 5 snapshots.
You will need Java 5.0+ installed. You need to run the tool from the command line (Start -> Run... "cmd" on Windows XP). Next I plan to add support for generating spreadsheets (with results per county) from CNN pages.
WEB SNAPSHOT 2.0 w/ CNN support
http://www.bbvforums.org/docs/tools/WebSnapshot-2.0.jar
Here is the updated WebSnapshot.jar and an example input file, adds a special notation for capturing CNN results per county in a csv file. Take a look at the example input file to see how this is done.
Installation instructions
---------------------------------------
1) Create a Directory C:\WebSnapshot
2) Download WebSnapshot.jar and urls.txt to this directory
http://www.bbvforums.org/docs/tools/urls-74129.txt
3) Open up a command prompt (Start -> Run... 'cmd')
4) Switch to directory (cd C:\WebSnapshot)
5) Run the java application from the command line (java -jar WebSnapshot.jar urls.txt)
Capture periodic snapshots by using the optional command line arguments (read the first post).
Press Ctrl+C to terminate the application early.
Java is completely free. Here is the instructions for downloading and installing Java 5.0.
1) http://java.sun.com/javase/downloads/index_jdk5.jsp
2) Select Java Runtime Environment (JRE) 5.0 Update 15
3) Choose your platform (e.g. Windows)
4) Download the Windows Offline Installation
5) Run the Installer (jre-1_5_0_15-windows-i586-p.exe)
Here's a guide to download and rename in Internet Explorer. This expands Step 2 in the installation instructions
a) Right click on WebSnapshot.jar link and select 'Save Target As...'
b) Select 'All Files' under Save as type
c) Enter 'WebSnapshot.jar' under File name.
d) Select the dropdown 'Save in' and choose 'Local Disk'
e) Double-click the WebSnapshot folder and click 'Save'
WEB SNAPSHOT 2.1: Added support for CNN exit polls. Extract the attached zip file to your C:\WebSnapshot directory.
http://www.bbvforums.org/docs/tools/WebSnapshot-2.1.zip
See the included urls.txt input file for an example. Next, I plan to add a snapshot summary feature to create spreadsheets of vote counts by snapshot time. This will help create graphs of the incoming voting data, and allow for a visual inspection of the results.
MERGE JOHN HOWARD'S SOUTH DAKOTA COMPENDIUM:
http://www.bbvforums.org/docs/tools/SouthDakotaCounties.html
(From John Howard): Here is the South Dakota Compendium of results sites. Basically there is only one - the SoS, with the exception of Pennington County which is also included here. I've included the addresses of the counties that have web sites, although they are not clickable links. Having visited each one today, I doubt that we'll see results posted on any of them. Please note that these are all results by Precinct for each county, with one file each for Dem and one for Rep voters. The SoS web site is SLOW to produce these results so I wouldn't advise running too many concurrent connections. Since all the SoS results will be of a consistent format, perhaps this can feed into Donovan Levinson's SNAPSHOT tool.
SOUTH DAKOTA UPDATE: WebSnapshot 2.2 including South Dakota http://www.bbvforums.org/docs/tools/WebSnapshot-2.2.zip
Finished adding support for South Dakota precinct results URLs (CERS). Also included is snapshot history report generation. These files end in "-history.csv" and contain all the vote counts by snapshot time. There is an issue where sometimes more than 256 columns are generated (#columns = #precincts * #choices + 1). Excel will only display the first 256 columns. I will add a workaround for this by saving across multiple files in a future release.
Extract the attached zip to your C:\WebSnapshot directory. See included urls.txt input file for an example.
2.2.1: Optimized to deal with URL hangs
http://www.bbvforums.org/docs/tools/WebSnapshot-2.2.1.zip
(Donovan): I hope to get some useful feedback from users during this last day of primaries. I have made one minor change, and that is to add a time out when downloading URLs, since the CERS URLs sometimes hang for a very long time. The timeout is set to 5 minutes. I will expose this variable and others in a properties file soon.
Also, I have attached two South Dakota input files for tracking the election results:
http://www.bbvforums.org/docs/tools/sd-dem.txt
http://www.bbvforums.org/docs/tools/sd-rep.txt
3) STATS SPREADSHEET TOOLS
FILES ARE UPLOADED - NOTE THAT THE VOTER REG SPREADSHEETS ACTUALLY CONTAIN 2 SHEETS: VOTER REG and VOTER TURNOUT, PROVISIONALS, ABSENTEE
Montana voting systems:
http://www.bbvdocs.org/MT/state/2008-jun-MT-votingsystems.xls
Montana registered voters 2004-2006:
http://www.bbvdocs.org/MT/state/2004-2006-MT-regvoters.xls
South Dakota registered voters 2004-2006:
http://www.bbvdocs.org/SD/state/2004-2006-SD-regvoters.xls
South Dakota voting systems:
http://www.bbvdocs.org/SD/state/2008-jun-SD-votingsystems.xls
Additional spreadsheet tools will be added here throughout the day today, including updated voter reg figures, turnout figures for 2004-2006, mail-in and provisional stats from 2006, and additional states
Alabama voting systems by county:
http://www.bbvdocs.org/AL/state/2008-jun-AL-votingsystems.xls
Alabama voter reg statistics and turnout, provisionals, and absentee data
http://www.bbvdocs.org/AL/state/2004-2006-SD-regvoters.xls
California voter reg, turnout, provisionals, absentee history 2004-2006:
http://www.bbvdocs.org/CA/state/2004-2006-CA-regvoters.xls
Iowa voting systems by county:
http://www.bbvdocs.org/IA/state/2008-jun-IA-votingsystems.xls
Iowa voter registration, turnout, provisional and absentee history 2004-2006
http://www.bbvdocs.org/IA/state/2004-2006-IA-regvoters.xls
New Jersey voting systems by county:
http://www.bbvdocs.org/NJ/state/2008-jun-NJ-votingsystems.xls
New Jersey voter reg, turnout, provisionals, absentee 2004-2006:
http://www.bbvdocs.org/NJ/state/2004-2006-NJ-regvoters.xls
New Mexico voting systems -- same system statewide: ES&S M100 & AutoMARK
New Mexico voter reg, turnout, provisionals, absentee history 2004-2006:
http://www.bbvdocs.org/NM/state/2004-2006-NM-regvoters.xls
PERMISSION TO REPRINT GRANTED
|
karen reineke
Frequent Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: Karen_r
Post Number: 179
Registered: 12-2006
Best of Black Box? N/A
Votes: 0 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Tuesday, June 3, 2008 - 2:18 pm: |
|
i apoligize if i am putting this in wrong place but i need some help looking at sarasota pls
watching jeanies amazing video again made me curious about sarasota so i googled the clerks office looking for results...no results posted so i googled florida sec of state...for whatever reason it wouldnt let me copy and paste that link but it said official results
at first all i wanted was to see what precinct 125 reported but i ran across impossible numbers
sarosta has 241,870 registered voters and according to sos 127,180 showed for the presidential preference race on the 29th
BUT when u look at the pres results the sos shows 1,749,920 votes for dem candidates and 1,949,498 votes for rep candidates...dats 3,699,418 votes
looking at the constitutional amendment their were 2,667,543 yes votes and 1,497,970 no votes ,,,dats 4,165,513 votes....roughly 32 times as many votes as they had peops turn out?
if someone could check the sos web site for florida and tell me what i am missing here i would apprciate it |
Catherine Ansbro
Frequent Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: Catherine_a
Post Number: 5076
Registered: 12-2004
Best of Black Box? N/A
Votes: 0 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Tuesday, June 3, 2008 - 2:27 pm: |
|
Good heavens. It's hard to think of any explanation for numbers like that, Karen. They seem too far out for either fraud or mistakes.
Maybe they were an Act of God. |
karen reineke
Frequent Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: Karen_r
Post Number: 180
Registered: 12-2006
Best of Black Box? N/A
Votes: 0 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Tuesday, June 3, 2008 - 2:44 pm: |
|
well i went back catherine and looks like the mistake is mine.....no matter what county i select,i get entire states results,not just that countys
jeanies video is amazing tho..it proves the machines can be "ovr ridden" so no matter what the voters input a dif result could be reported |
Bev Harris
Board Administrator
Username: Admin
Post Number: 8300
Registered: 12-2004
Best of Black Box? N/A
Votes: 0 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Tuesday, June 3, 2008 - 3:29 pm: |
|
Karen, you point out something important though. You have caught some doozy impossible numbers, but we should also recognize that several anomalies will have valid explanations (as contrasted with the invalid "Oops Excuse").
The first step is to locate the anomalies. The next step is to see if the anomaly is stable -- that is, can it be replicated, or is it documented on a solid source that shouldn't contain errors (such as the government results reporting sites).
What you found replicates from county to county, and from my reading of it, may be a misunderstanding or may be incorrect programming or a poorly designed presentation of the data.
Seek the anomalies. See whether there is a logical and acceptable explanation. Then see what we're left with.
Unfortunately, we're usually left with a lot that is illogical and has no appropriate explanation. |
karen reineke
Frequent Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: Karen_r
Post Number: 181
Registered: 12-2006
Best of Black Box? N/A
Votes: 0 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Tuesday, June 3, 2008 - 3:32 pm: |
|
after lil more looking i found the certification certificate for canvassing boards report...the state sos web site links to sarosotas web site and it was in there
the last line reports 127,180 total ballots cast
but when u add the yes votes 84,720 and the no votes 43,050 =127,770 thats 590 more votes than voters? |
karen reineke
Frequent Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: Karen_r
Post Number: 182
Registered: 12-2006
Best of Black Box? N/A
Votes: 0 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Tuesday, June 3, 2008 - 3:53 pm: |
|
the canvassing report for sarosota didnt match the distric 13 report either....do votes for district 13 come from somewhr besides sarosota?
bev u know how frustrated i get...lol
i am srry i jumped the gun on that first post but this second number question says official and dent signs it...i cant get web site to print or save,but i am working off an old puter as mine is in shop,so could be prob at my end
pls check that web site and let me know if i am missing something, thanks all |
John Howard
Frequent Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: Harmonyguy
Post Number: 602
Registered: 12-2004
Best of Black Box? N/A
Votes: 0 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Tuesday, June 3, 2008 - 6:04 pm: |
|
Montana Compendium
Below is the Compendium file for Montana Results by County. I've manually checked what few actual county websites I could find, and they just don't seem to be big on publishing county by county. For tonight, we'll start with the county by county results from the SoS website.
While not as big a concern as with South Dakota, please keep your concurrent connections low (4 or less) so that their sites do not get overwhelmed.
Please also note that because of the large number of individual files (192) a single timeslice of Montana and South Dakota combined is 60MB of data.
HG;) |
Bev Harris
Board Administrator
Username: Admin
Post Number: 8301
Registered: 12-2004
Best of Black Box? N/A
Votes: 0 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Tuesday, June 3, 2008 - 6:36 pm: |
|
Thanks, John. Precious little precinct data in these states, eh?
Flathead County in Montana has been doing quite a few upgrades to chain of custody and transparency, though they still have more to do.
I just uploaded the other states voting systems and voter reg, turnout, provisional ballot, and absentee history from 2004-06.
The other states having elections today are:
New Jersey
New Mexico
Iowa
California
Alabama
(If there are more they've slipped by me, please point 'em out and I'll be suitably embarrassed.)
I still have to update California's voting system listings, because there has been quite a bit of movement there, mostly the DRE counties shifting to central count optical scan.
Today's elections, network TV notwithstanding, are probably most relevant in the area of US Senate, US Rep, and state legislative primaries.
I edited the links to the new spreadsheet data into the main post, but here it is again:
Alabama voting systems by county:
http://www.bbvdocs.org/AL/state/2008-jun-AL-votingsystems.xls
Alabama voter reg statistics and turnout, provisionals, and absentee data
http://www.bbvdocs.org/AL/state/2004-2006-SD-regvoters.xls
California voter reg, turnout, provisionals, absentee history 2004-2006:
http://www.bbvdocs.org/CA/state/2004-2006-CA-regvoters.xls
Iowa voting systems by county:
http://www.bbvdocs.org/IA/state/2008-jun-IA-votingsystems.xls
Iowa voter registration, turnout, provisional and absentee history 2004-2006
http://www.bbvdocs.org/IA/state/2004-2006-IA-regvoters.xls
New Jersey voting systems by county:
http://www.bbvdocs.org/NJ/state/2008-jun-NJ-votingsystems.xls
New Jersey voter reg, turnout, provisionals, absentee 2004-2006:
http://www.bbvdocs.org/NJ/state/2004-2006-NJ-regvoters.xls
New Mexico voting systems -- same system statewide: ES&S M100 & AutoMARK
New Mexico voter reg, turnout, provisionals, absentee history 2004-2006:
http://www.bbvdocs.org/NM/state/2004-2006-NM-regvoters.xls
|
John Howard
Frequent Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: Harmonyguy
Post Number: 603
Registered: 12-2004
Best of Black Box? N/A
Votes: 0 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Tuesday, June 3, 2008 - 6:50 pm: |
|
Dang !!!
I didn't realize that other states were holding elections, too. I have the complete (one of the biggest and best) New Mexico by Precinct Compendium on CD, just wasn't ready to roll with it tonight.
I see that unfortunately SD has slowed to a crawl.
HG;) |
Bev Harris
Board Administrator
Username: Admin
Post Number: 8303
Registered: 12-2004
Best of Black Box? N/A
Votes: 0 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Tuesday, June 3, 2008 - 6:52 pm: |
|
Well if we watch nothing else, watch Monterey County Calif. They decided to hide what is on their computer, violating Calif. 15004 rights, and have just announced that they plan to arrest Black Box Voting board member Jim March (again) for attempting to exercise these rights under Calif. law. |
Bev Harris
Board Administrator
Username: Admin
Post Number: 8304
Registered: 12-2004
Best of Black Box? N/A
Votes: 0 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Tuesday, June 3, 2008 - 6:56 pm: |
|
Also watch Bernalillo County New Mexico. The election official there was getting very squirrely, putting out an emergency bulletin to recruit pollworkers on Sunday (you heard me) saying that they had quit in droves because they have to use paper ballots (right) and that she doesn't think training will be a problem.
Monterey County Calif, as you'll remember, is the location that had its elections registrar convicted of embezzlement. Bernalillo County New Mexico also had its former elections director convicted of embezzlement, but that happened while he was elections director of another New Mexico county. Bernalillo hired him anyway but now has a new one, who wants to blame her inadequate recruiting and management skills on paper ballots.
Two pearls, these counties... |
John Howard
Frequent Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: Harmonyguy
Post Number: 604
Registered: 12-2004
Best of Black Box? N/A
Votes: 0 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Tuesday, June 3, 2008 - 7:29 pm: |
|
Since you asked so nicely....
- It's not pretty but should be functional.....
I'll see if I can do anything with Monterey.
HG;) |
John Howard
Frequent Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: Harmonyguy
Post Number: 605
Registered: 12-2004
Best of Black Box? N/A
Votes: 0 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Tuesday, June 3, 2008 - 7:42 pm: |
|
And here's a quickie for California with Monterey's results. Once again, not pretty, but...
HG;) |
Bev Harris
Board Administrator
Username: Admin
Post Number: 8305
Registered: 12-2004
Best of Black Box? N/A
Votes: 0 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Tuesday, June 3, 2008 - 9:11 pm: |
|
Wow. Bernalillo is great on detail. Did you say all of New Mexico is that way?
An update on Jim March: Well, I'll let him write it. Bottom line, he's not in jail at the moment because Monterey backed down, but he saw some things there that made me shocked and made me laugh at the same time.
Baxter the chimp's got nothing on these rocket scientists.
I'll let Jim write it up.
Your tools are great, but I can see that I have to practice more because I have to think too hard to fully utilize them. However -- that's just the point of the lead story here, which is already circulating nicely through the blogosphere. We all have to practice.
Thanks to you and Donovan, we have time. |
John Howard
Frequent Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: Harmonyguy
Post Number: 606
Registered: 12-2004
Best of Black Box? N/A
Votes: 0 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Tuesday, June 3, 2008 - 9:45 pm: |
|
This detail isn't courtesy of Bernalillo County - it's courtesy of the New Mexico Secretary of State site, which has, in my opion, one of the best results reporting systems of any state. It's consistent from election to election in its presentation, isn't overly fancy, provides precinct-level detail, appears to not actively evade observation, and is served-up by what are obviously adequate computing resources to keep up with demand.
I'm not able to comment on the web-reporting systems used by the individual NM counties since I haven't looked at them since 2006. Certainly at THAT time, many of them left much to be desired.
South Dakota appears to have tried to deliver a good level of detail this year, but also appears to have tried to be too fancy in their presentation, however the computing resources to deliver the fancy detail appear to have been woefully inadequate for the job, and the site has slowed down to a crawl.
Many (most) other states could serve their constituents well by following New Mexico's lead in web reporting.
HG;) |
Bev Harris
Board Administrator
Username: Admin
Post Number: 8310
Registered: 12-2004
Best of Black Box? N/A
Votes: 0 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Tuesday, June 3, 2008 - 9:55 pm: |
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So if New Mexico has got it right, why does the EAC have to dole out $10 million to five states to study how to post precinct results? Trying to find a way to screw it up or overcomplexify it? That's a news story I haven't had time to post yet. |
John Howard
Frequent Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: Harmonyguy
Post Number: 607
Registered: 12-2004
Best of Black Box? N/A
Votes: 0 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Tuesday, June 3, 2008 - 10:11 pm: |
|
Here's a money saving idea for them in three words - JUST DO IT.
Never mind the fancy graphics, or cool expanding and contracting levels of detail, or the flashy java or animations, or hiring a consultant to do any or all of the above.
Here are the steps to success:
1 - count ballots
2 - get results
3 - post the results
repeat until done
What's to study? - Save the 10 million and just do it.
In my opinion, New Mexico HAS got it right.
HG;)
edited for typos |
V. Kurt Bellman
Frequent Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: Formerelecdir
Post Number: 2516
Registered: 4-2006
Best of Black Box? N/A
Votes: 0 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Wednesday, June 4, 2008 - 11:59 am: |
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John,
I've seen a lot of election management software programs, and some are pretty "user friendly" when it comes to getting results posted on the web, and some others almost make it impossible.
Where it gets REALLY stupid is in a mixed vendor environment like Philadelphia, PA or much of Kentucky. Where you have a dual vendor system in place, reporting modules tend to, to put it as nicely as I can, SUCK!
Automation goes out the window and manual aggregation and manual data entry become the norm.
If I had to nominate one DETAIL of electronic elections that needs help (as opposed to the whole idea of it) it would be reporting in general, and web reporting in particular. For some reason, these vendors never made getting detail results out on the web a priority.
One counter-example is ES&S - they seem to at least made doing it somewhat more of a priority.
==========================================
http://kurtspeak.blogspot.com
(some relevant to subjects here, most not)
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John Howard
Frequent Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: Harmonyguy
Post Number: 608
Registered: 12-2004
Best of Black Box?
Votes: 1 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Monday, June 9, 2008 - 10:52 pm: |
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Attached are two Compendium files - one each for North Dakota and South Carolina for Tuesday's Elections. I believe that I'll be able to publish one for Virginia, and already have it complete but for one piece of the link that I won't know until the first result is posted. Stay tuned...
A caution on the South Carolina Results. One part of each link from the state-site, is a version number. I'm not clear on how they use it, or whether it will actually change throughout the night, as results are reported. If you find unexpected results, check back here and I'll try to keep the Compendium updated with what I find.
South Carolina only has three counties that appear to be publishing their own results, with the remainder relying on the State Election Commission to publish theirs. Unfortunately this keeps results-checkers one step further away from the source of the results, and disables one more level of possible error detection. I much prefer counties that publish their own results at the source, that can then be checked against the results posted by the state. Sometimes this comparison can be very revealing - showing that the county published results quite some time before they were published on the state site. With sufficient data, patterns can be detected which, in some cases, may verify or refute some of the process explanations put forth by the process participants.
HG;)
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Donovan Levinson
Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: Lofi
Post Number: 27
Registered: 4-2008
Best of Black Box?
Votes: 1 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Tuesday, June 10, 2008 - 7:05 pm: |
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Here's URLs for CNN Electoral College predictions: data.map.swf data.xml
To captures the files locally, save both to the same directory (you cannot rename data.xml). Then open the data.map.swf file using your web browser.
For those interested, I found all these URLs using wireshark. Digging into the Javascript will only give you a migraine. |
Donovan Levinson
Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: Lofi
Post Number: 28
Registered: 4-2008
Best of Black Box? N/A
Votes: 0 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Tuesday, June 10, 2008 - 7:09 pm: |
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^^ wireshark.org |
Chandler Carter
Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: Chsjumpmaster
Post Number: 1
Registered: 11-2008
Best of Black Box? N/A
Votes: 0 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Sunday, November 2, 2008 - 4:02 pm: |
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Greetings.
My roommate and I are going to try and closely monitor Dorchester County, South Carolina. This is my first attempt at using the Tracker or using Snapshot.
Any assistance in configuring Tracker and the txt files for making it all work is very much appreciated.
Have a great day!
Chandler |
christine c reid
Frequent Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: Ctwatcher
Post Number: 1072
Registered: 12-2007
Best of Black Box? N/A
Votes: 0 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Monday, November 3, 2008 - 7:24 am: |
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Chandler, thanks and welcome! Hope you have a great adventure and net some good documentation.
IDEA: you might try cross posting under the technical topics -- some people subscribe only to certain threads and might miss your request for help.
Meanwhile, if you click on forums in the left column, there is a search feature and you may be able to more quickly unearth some tech assistance using search mode. |
John Howard
Frequent Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: Harmonyguy
Post Number: 629
Registered: 12-2004
Best of Black Box?
Votes: 1 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Tuesday, November 4, 2008 - 7:24 am: |
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Chandler - thanks for wanting to monitor Dorchester County. That particular county does not appear to be posting its results on its own website, instead posting them on the Statewide site. Their results will be found at
http://www.enr-scvotes.org/SC/Dorchester/8580/index.html
Please note that the South Carolina file further up in this thread will NOT work for THIS election. (We've learned much since the last one) In fact, please don't even attempt to use it, since it will just bog down their server with needless requests, and won;t provide the data you're looking for.
I'll try to post more detail for the tracker later today.
HG;) |
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Montana Compendium
North Dakota Results Compendium