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Q: Executive Director of Common Cause Georgia Aunna Dennis - I’m wondering when it comes to having more paper ballots at precincts for election day, are you all gonna have more allocation that’s not just 10% of a voting population or are gonna expand that to 15% to 20 to 25% after what we saw in June with the delays, extensions, some precincts not having enough ballots, I’m wondering what type of provisions are you all doing at a state level to make sure counties have enough supplies in the form of paper ballots for election day?
[50:40] Gabriel Sterling: Well we’ve, the rule is 10%, but we discovered unfortunately that some people interpreted 10% to be 0% which was obviously the worst possible outcome, and we are working with them all on logistics plans, we have some specific counties where we are going to be doing some special reviews with and they have to give us their plans on…getting those deployed properly to the right place, because emergency ballots have, well they’re precinct based, you can’t just print the ballot for your county or the districts that you’re…you have to have a precinct based thing, so you have to make sure to have all those.
And one of the things that we did when we purchased the entire system for the state was that every county will be given a mobile ballot printer and with that they can…the whole point of that is you’ll have the 10% in that location. Let’s say worst things happen, everything goes to crap, power goes out, it floods the room, you can go to the county office, and the bigger counties have multiples of these obviously and they can print more and there’s going to be a rover plan to make sure those are put in, the plan is those are belt and suspenders and one thing that was very frustrating for us at the state level is that if people would follow the rules and do the things you’re supposed to do a lot of the stuff wouldn’t have happened.
And what we really discovered was, by losing the institutional knowledge of our older poll workers, because the average age of our poll worker is 70 so we obviously lost a lot of those people for their own safety and rightfully so, didn’t go, it wasn’t the equipment it was the election process because people didn’t understand. And even people who did understand somewhat, they were treating the emergency ballots like provisional ballots. So they were taking it, they putting it in the sleeves, they were signing all that stuff, when really with an emergency ballot, if you’ve ever hand worked an emergency ballot, you put that it in the scanner, it gets counted just like the BMD ballot does.
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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 Colorado 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 mean