The Humboldt Election Transparency Project
The data hosted here is from the Election Transparency Project of Humboldt County or ETP. ETP was a first of a kind endeavor established by Kevin Collins, Tom Pinto of the D.A.s office, Green Party Presidential Candidate David Cobb, Parke Bostrom and Carolyn Crnich. Mitch Trachtenberg began working with them in an effort to assess the validity of the automatic vote counting machines produced by Premier[TM]. Formerly called Diebold[TM], Premier[TM] produced ballot counting machines for the Humboldt county that still keep a paper trail. Trachtenberg figured that by demonstrating how paper ballots could be independently counted, [he would] be providing a useful argument for those who were trying to prevent the touch screens from becoming more popular. [He] also thought [he would] be verifying the vendor counts, and putting the vendors on notice that independent counts could be done, limiting any future impulse towards shenanigans. Trachtenberg developed a scanning program that would allow complete anonymity of the ballots; however, the ballots could be posted in an open format for others to conduct a recount if necessary. The program scans the ballots and imprints a serial number on the ballot detailing information about where the ballot was cast. During the scanning, it also tallies the votes. To keep it completely transparent, the program has a delay built in so that a live audience can watch and record their own counts independently. This allows any potential problems in the program's tally to be caught. The count that Trachtenberg conducted along with Carolyn Crnich produced some interesting findings; namely, the Premier[TM] machines didn't count 216 ballots nor did it record that they were missing these ballots. The problem in the Premier[TM] code is that sometimes a whole deck, or group of ballots, can be erased from their archives without warning. This means that election officials can believe that those votes were counted but in reality the machine deleted those votes. It turns out that Premier[TM] knew about these problems with their code but failed to disseminate the information about it properly. Below are the scanned files from this project. They have been made completely open because this kind of transparency allows the most efficient and fair type of elections.
The Data
ASC ZIP SIZE 00 00 1.1GB 01 01 999MB 02 02 1021MB 02 03 983MB 04 04 1.1GB 05 05 1.1GB 06 06 356MB 10 10 1014MB 11 11 1.1GB 12 12 980MB 13 13 1008MB 14 14 1014MB 15 15 981MB 16 16 511MB Counting software development snapshot Images of write-in candidates
Additional Information
Humboldt Election Transparency Project Website
May 19, 2009 Ballot Montages
Democracy Counts: Mitch Trachtenberg's Humboldt Election Transparency Project Website