Pre-Election Audit of Memory Cards for the November 2008 Presidential Elections

The UConn VoTeR Center performed a pre-election audit of the memory cards for the Accu-Vote Optical Scan tabulators that are to be used in the November 2008 Elections in Connecticut. The cards are programmed by LHS Associates of Methuen, Massachusetts, and shipped to Connecticut districts for use in the elections. For the pre-election audit the VoTeR Center received and examined 620 memory cards as of November 3, 2008. These cards correspond to 620 distinct districts in Connecticut. About 2/3 of these memory cards were randomly chosen by the VoTeR Center personnel during the visits to LHS and before the cards were packed and shipped to the towns. Another 1/3 of the memory cards came from the towns directly, where the cards were randomly chosen for pre-election audit (this procedure applied to the town for which the cards were not selected at LHS). The towns that shipped the cards to be audited were not asked to perform the local pre-election testing before shipping, thus the majority of the cards received from the towns did not contain the pre-election testing events in their audit logs.

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Pre-Election Audit of Memory Cards for the August 2008 Connecticut Primary Elections

The UConn VoTeR Center performed a pre-election audit of the memory cards for the AccuVote Optical Scan tabulators that were used in the August 2008 Connecticut Primary Elections. The cards were programmed by LHS Associates of Methuen, Massachusetts. The districts covered by this pre-election audit included all 185 districts participating in the elections. The VoTeR Center received in total 185 memory cards before the elections to be audited. The memory cards were shipped by LHS directly to the VoTeR Center. This document reports on the findings obtained as the result of the audit. Among the 185 cards received and tested by the VoTeR Center, 175 cards (94.6%) were found to have been properly programmed for election. These cards contained valid ballot data and the executable code on these cards was the expected code, with no extraneous data or code on the cards. The remaining 10 cards, or 5.4%, were found to contain “junk” data, that is, they did not contain usable data. Such cards are detected by the tabulators to be unusable, thus they could not have been used in the election.

The audit was performed on request of the Office of the Secretary of the State.

Full report: audit0808pre

Pre-Election Audit of Memory Cards for the November 2007 Connecticut Elections

The UConn VoTeR Center performed an audit of the pre-election memory cards for the AccuVote Optical Scan tabulators that were to be used in the November 2007 Connecticut Elections. The cards were programmed by LHS Associates of Methuen, Massachusetts, and shipped to the towns in Connecticut. The towns were instructed to test the cards and to choose randomly one out of each four cards per district to be shipped for the audit.

The total of 522 cards were received and tested by the VoTeR Center, out of which 378 cards were received before the election. Out of the total number of cards, 18 cards, or 3.5% were found to contain “junk” data, that is, they were unreadable, which is easily detected by the tabulators as such, and could not have been used in the election. The rest of the cards, or 96.6%, were found to have been properly programmed for election. These cards contained valid ballot data and the executable code on these cards was the expected code, with no extraneous data or code on the cards.
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