Summary of the Electronic Voting Verification Proposal

Now that you have seen these web pages, let's see how the system would dovetail with a convention election.

Balloting

After the candidates give their speeches, balloting would be opened, delegates would have several minutes to cast their votes on an electronic keypad, and then the chair would close the balloting.

Vote Verification

After balloting is closed, any delegate would be able to navigate a mobile device (browser) to a web page to verify his vote. He would enter the serial number of the electronic keypad he used to cast his vote, choose the race and the ballot, and then click Continue.

On the web page (the "group" page), the delegate would see and confirm his vote. The "group" page would display 20 lines of information--one line for each keypad in the group. But it would show only how the delegate voted--not how others in his group voted.

Any delegate whose vote was not recorded correctly would be invited to approach the Elections Desk immediately, where the problem would be resolved.

This phase of the verification would take several minutes--long enough for any delegate with a voting problem to resolve it.

After any voting problems were resolved, the chair would close this phase of the process.

Tally Verification

The chair would declare the results to be final, announce the results, and invite delegates to verify that their votes are tallied correctly (by clicking the Continue link to see the group total, the cluster total, and the final result).

A Delegate would be able to navigate to the next web page, where the sum of the 20 votes in his group would be displayed. He would see how others in his group voted (but the vote would remain anonymous because he would not know serial numbers of others' keypads). He would verify that the votes were added correctly (that the totals line is correct), note the vote totals on his group page, and then click Continue.

The delegate would then see his "cluster" page, where the vote totals of 20 group pages would be displayed. He would verify that the votes were added correctly (that the totals line is correct), note the vote totals on his clusters page, and then click Continue.

The delegate would then see the "final results" page, where the vote totals of 10 cluster pages would be displayed. He would verify that the votes were added correctly (that the totals line is correct), and that the vote totals on the summary page matched the results that were announced by the chair.

NOTE: As long as each of the 200 groups had at least one delegate who verified the vote tally as described here, the tally for the entire ballot could be certified as accurate. In fact, the 200 delegates could be designated as poll watchers, and the convention could wait a few minutes while the tally was verified by each of the 200 delegates.

Repeat

This process would be repeated for each ballot of each election conducted by electronic keypad.

My guess is that each phase (balloting, vote verification, tally verification) would take three to five minutes, and therefore each ballot would take about 15 minutes. The first couple ballots might take longer, but as delegates got the hang of the system, the time required to conduct a ballot would decrease.

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