An acronym followed by the word “test” hardly sounds worth reading about, but L&A testing, as it’s known in Elections speak, is critical to ensuring the accuracy of your vote.
Its formal name is Logic and Accuracy Testing, and it got underway at 40 Tower Road this week. Things were hopping this afternoon – with about 25 San Mateo County Elections folk focused on the task - and should finish up by the end of the day Friday.
So, what the heck is it? Simple. It’s all about making sure that the programs installed on voting equipment, as well as the equipment itself, read and record votes the way voters intend. Testing is completed using dozens of extra hands at the Elections Office who spend hours following specific instructions to cast test ballots that cover all the candidates and races in November’s election.
Elections Manager David Tom explains L&A this way: “Here’s a set of predetermined votes. Vote it on the machine. And the machine better return the same results.”
It’s the primary pre-election testing of the system, simulating a real election.
“This is for us to be certain that the program that is used on Election Day is accurate,” Tom said.
Working in pairs, Election folk are going through all 42 ballot styles for this November’s election on the eSlates, our electronic voting machines. Each ballot is in three languages – English, Spanish, and Chinese – making for 126 different ballots styles in all. Every candidate, plus write-ins, on each of those ballots will be voted for a predetermined number of times.
Here’s an example: Ballot instructions have been designed such that candidate John Doe in the San Mateo Union High School District Board of Trustees race will be voted for three times in the overall process. When all is said and done, there must be three votes on record for Mr. Doe. If there are, the system is up to snuff.
Some workers are conducting their testing using the eSlates’ alternative voting methods for the disabled, such as tactile jelly buttons for the mobility impaired. Others will use headphones – designed for the visually impaired – to ensure that the audio reading of the ballot is accurate.
Testing is not only conducted on eSlates, but also on BallotNow, the equipment used to count paper and Vote by Mail ballots. (About 40 percent of San Mateo County’s registered voters Vote by Mail, and their ballots are expected to account for half of the votes cast in this election.)
Tom said that they’ve yet to find anything out of sorts – votes thus far are being tabulated as they were intended to be entered. Phew.
And that should help boost your confidence on Election Day that what you’re voting is what’s being recorded.
Computers, as we all know, do as they are instructed to do in computer language, regardless of law or ethics.
The L&A testing is rather ridiculous because nobody really doubts the computers CAN count, the doubtful thing is what the computers will be INSTRUCTED TO DO ON ELECTION DAY. And only an idiot hacker or rigger would hack the test, and its rather simple to write code to specify that only actual election conditions on election day when there are more than, say 60 votes on a machine will the program kick in.
In any event, even if one things that America and San Mateo County are very unattractive places that nobody would want to be in power in, the point is that L&A testing is a farce and a joke and can only build false confidence. There’s no substitute for a complete determination of what code executed on election day itself L&A testing is basically a dinosaur from the days of analog machines which, if they worked well on Monday were highly likely to work well on election tuesday. Not so with computers.