9 minutes on paper vs electronic poll pads
comments given at isanti township
Last night the Isanti and Chisago auditors presented at the Isanti Township Officers meeting for about half an hour (including intermittent questions) and I was thankfully given a few minutes to offer an alternative perspective, along with two others who joined me from ACEIT, learn more at aceit.vote.
For now I’ll just post the end of Isanti auditor’s comments which lead into my own:
One of the commissioners said during the meeting he wanted to get it on an upcoming agenda.
The evening brought a few things together for me.
We are rarely given a chance to speak in key meetings like this - opportunity taken, what happens from there we shall see but I think something happened in the room
Speaking for about 9 minutes felt like an eternity compared with 2- or 3-minute remarks at commissioner public forums… was able to share quite a bit about the journey here and the decision point for the county between paper rosters and electronic poll pads—trust, cost, impact
The narrative for electronic poll pads is falling apart… the auditor seemed to claim at one point that the iPads from KNOWiNK don’t have internet capability, when they have cellular connections that I’m fairly sure are required for data to flow outside and into the precinct related to absentee voter data
It was also interesting that the Chisago auditor was present, who I’d had a phone call with about 3 years prior revealing what seemed like a federal election crime, which is in [S]elections in Minnesota and also mentioned in this excerpt from recently released book…
EXCERPT: Auditing Minnesota: The 2022 SOS Campaign
A few days later I received an email from the the Chisago County Administrator providing a 1,726-page PDF, the Hart Intercivic cast vote record for Chisago’s primary election. (It did not include ballot images; to this day, I have never seen a ballot image from Minnesota, nor know anyone who has, which are the images the tabulators are supposed to by definition create through a scan which is then interpreted.)
By itself, the PDF document, without a comparison with the paper ballots (and without the ballot images), had limited use, but it was the first example of such a report to my knowledge ever seen by the public in Minnesota. Some counties in various states have since published not only such reports but the ballot images themselves online on their county-level websites. Only a month or so later a resident of Fillmore County helped the Fillmore County Auditor produce a cast vote record (also lacking ballot images) from the Electionware system, the first example in Minnesota from a county using Elections System & Software.
When I spoke with Rick next, he was glad to learn about Chisago. He said I should continue writing. Because the road to fair elections was not over.
Indeed, the 2022 midterms were still ahead of us. Not to mention 2024…
