The third day of New York State’s Voting Machine Certification testing proceeded without problem. Today’s test efforts focused on final preparation of the systems prior to voting. After insertion of the ballot programs created on the EMS earlier in the week, the machines were sealed, and administrative setup functions performed. Setup includes things like checking the clock, calibrating touch screens, and checking the accuracy of the ballots.

The sealing process is an important one, and took quite a bit of time. It’s important to remember that all seals are tamper EVIDENT, NOT tamper PROOF. Seals are only designed to provide evidence of unauthorized entry, NOT prevent it. It’s therefore critical that inspection of seals by election workers be thorough, looking carefully for evidence of tampering. Indeed, I’ve come to believe that training of poll workers and election officials in the proper use and inspection of tamper evident seals (and other security procedures) is critical, and is one of the challenges of using modern voting equipment. This is an area that we simply cannot skimp on, and all states are going to need to do a lot better than they have so far on this essential training element.

The ballots started arriving back from the printer in the late morning, and after configuration of the machines the first test ballots were run to verify they were correctly programmed and printed. The next steps, to take place today, are to mark the ballots (some by hand, some using the BMDs) as specified by the test plan, and run them through the scanners. This is will take place on Day Four.

I’ve posted many new images on the Facebook Photo page. I’ve also added a new Album containing photos of the ImageCast and DS200 scanners for those who have not yet seen them. Hopefully it will answer some of the questions I’ve been getting from folks outside of New York State about the details of these new systems.