The second day of New York State’s Voting Machine Certification testing again focused on completing ballot programming on the Election Management System (EMS) systems for the Dominion ImageCast and ES&S DS200/Automark. While one team member reads through the steps of the test plan on a spreadsheet, the other performs that step. Then, if the results are as expected (the results also specified in the test plan), they move on to the next step. Any variations or problems that pop up are noted in the spreadsheet. So far things have run well except for one hiccup noted below.

Today’s work focused on finishing the Landscape mode ballots, and converting them to Portrait mode (NYS allows for both ballot orientations). One brief problem cropped up when the Dominion EMS software conversion feature from Landscape to Portrait orientation wouldn’t work at first. A tech from Dominion looked at the problem, and after a while determined that an earlier, test database had been improperly removed when the test machine was configured. Removing the earlier database rectified the problem and testing proceeded. The problem was noted in the test log. I should note that this Portrait-to-Landscape conversion feature is not a requirement of the Voluntary Voting System Guidelines or New York State Election law.

Audio ballots for the Ballot Marking Device (BMD) were also created. The audio for the candidate names was recorded by a Board of Elections staffer directly into the EMS database. This recording of the candidate’s name is played back to the voter when using the BMD audio.

By the end of the day, ballot programming was wrapping up. Ballot programs were installed on the machines, and sample ballots were printed to verify that they were accurate before the PDF files were sent out to the printer. Two printers, one in the Albany area and one in Rochester, NY, will be printing the ballots tonight for delivery in the morning. Tomorrow, the plan calls for creation of the test decks, requiring marking and verifying hundreds of ballots (as a Advisory Committee member I will help out with this). Then, the scanners and BMDs themselves will be tested with the test decks, but this probably won’t begin until Thursday.

I’ve posted a few pictures from today on the Facebook photo album. Of interest today is one of the first pictures of the Dominion scanner WITHOUT BMD. This version is a scanner only, and has no BMD. Many New York Counties are buying these in addition to the original ImageCast Scanner/BMD combo, so as to have one scanner for each Election District in a polling place.