THIS VIDEO IS A TWITCH FROM AUG2020
Gabriel Sterling is answering questions about voter registration in GREAT DETAIL…I am sure there could be some evidence here.
GABRIEL STERLING IS A WEALTH OF INFO
I transcribed Gabriel Sterlings answers only…
PT7
Participants Dan Whisenhunt Decaturish Twitch Show
State Director of all voting is local Akima Khondoker
Executive Director of Common Cause Georgia Aunna Dennis
President of Georgia League of Women Voters and Susannah Scott
Q: One thing that came up in the last primary election was the sensitivity of the machines…I wanna preface this with, for the love of god if there’s anybody listening to this when you fill out your ballot, please, please, please bubble in the whole circle of your choice, I mean like fill the whole damn thing in with a pencil or a pen, whatever, don’t make an X, don’t circle it
[44:19] Gabriel Sterling: Now, with the pen, black or blue ink, no pencils (talk over)
Q: No pencils, black or blue ink, for the love of god do that because what’ll happen is you got people who will do that on the top half of the ballot and they get down to the bottom and they’re like errrrh, this guy, this guy and they do a check or something so tell your grandma, tell your uncle, tell everyone who’s filling this thing out, bubble in the whole damn circle.
But we know, not everyone is going to follow the instructions, Gabriel what guidance are election officials being given as to how to count those ballots?
[45:02] Gabriel Sterling: Better than guidance, we have a rule that we just passed…we moved the, and part of this gets into the deep understanding of how scanners interpret information, what we did, and don’t quote me in a court of law on this, I’m giving you a general amount, I always get it off by 1% and people yell at me on twitter, so if you were, the old one was 0 to 14% is not a mark, so from 0 to 13% it’s not a mark, 14 to 35 is ambiguous and anything above 35 is a mark it’s an intended human…they did that.
What the old system was, it was either a mark or it wasn’t a mark. We now have this thing called adjudication in this system, where if the computer says I’m not sure what this guy meant to do, it’ll bring that ballot up and you can see it, and what we did, we ran a lot of tests after this because, again when we bought this stuff we weren’t assuming we were gonna have half the votes cast on these things so we were a lot more focused on the other side and the rules around them, and we just kinda took, the EAC certified the system at the settings we got it at so that’s what we used.
So what we did is, we now lowered it to where 10%, 0 to 10% is going to be not a mark, 10% to 20% is the ambiguous zone and 20% and up is an obvious mark, because we looked through it, anything above 20% was obvious, and what you gotta understand is, there are other states that have lower zones for this, like Colarado but they use a red dropout which means the oval itself is red, which is not read by the computer so our oval by itself is 5 to 8%, so if you lower it too much , you are going to get a lot of over votes and unintended consequences with people slightly hitting it with the pen and a stray mark will slow the system down.
So we’ve set it from 10 to 20 and basically when you bring it to the adjudication module if the ob, if the voters intention is obvious, then the adjudication team, Susannah is it a Republican, a Democrat and third person usually an election worker. They’ll decide or vote this is what the person…Frankly I’ve never seen an adjudication that wasn’t 3 nothing, it’s almost always obvious what the voter was intending to do.
So we lowered the sensitivity somewhat, but if you lower it too much you stop the whole system and if you raise it too much you’re missing votes. So we’re trying to find a sweet spot and understand a place like Colorado, Oregon, those guys spent 8 years kind of refining and doing this We launched this whole absentee ballot program about 6 weeks. So we are learning from this, we set that after a lot of testing, so 10 to 20 % is the new thing and any time there is an adjudicatable vote on there, the entire ballot is shown, you can change stuff throughout the ballot if they can see oh this person, this didn’t make the line but it’s obvious what that person meant