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# Challenge Board (RE: Gems 1.13.7)

- To: <support@gesn.com>
- Subject: Challenge Board (RE: Gems 1.13.7)
- From: "Ken Clark" <ken@gesn.com>
- Date: Wed, 27 Oct 1999 18:17:45 -0500
- Importance: Normal
- In-reply-to: <01BF209B.F1A5D520@ip54.charlotte9.nc.pub-ip.psi.net>

> Testing "Challenge Board" and received a GEMS Exception -
> Internal Error message on the following:
>
> 1) Selecting then re-selecting Vote Center.
> 2) Scrolling VCenter using arrow keys.
> 3) Highlight VCenter, select Reviewed and half way through the
> list receive same error.
Okay, the user interface sounds like its still pretty rough. I'll try to stabilize it a bit once I push out El Paso import. Does it at least "work" for you if you tread lightly?

Note though that this is a list of ballots, not vote centers, that you are looking at. It lists the ballot serial number along with the vote center and machine on which it was recorded.
> Other questions:
> 1) What does "Clear" do? Does not show any visual change.
Nothing :-). Its supposed to clear votes in the challenge counter batch for the selected vote center. You can re-post though, and reset-election will take you to square one, so I postponed implementing it just yet.
> 2) Have one VCenter that the "Reviewed" box is checked and grayed
> out, and the Accepted box is unchecked and grayed out? Is this a bug?
That depends on what the "counted in" and "reviewed in" boxes say, and what vcenter is currently selected. More below. Can you reproduce it?
> Any additional info. on this would be greatly appreciated.
I didn't really know whether anyone was going to use the GEMS challenge. If you can get away with accepting challenge voters using the Poll Book challenge feature, that would be my suggestion. The downside is (1) you can print out a report of who you accepted/rejected and (2) the selections you make are only stored on the Poll Book. They are not written to the floppy. Gaston has so few challenged voters though that both those problems probably have procedural solutions.

Having said that, welcome to GEMS' newest feature, Challenge Board. Its really best if you try to think of the challenge board exactly like the central count dialog. To GEMS, in fact, they are exactly the same. The challenge board has one "virtual deck" per vote center that gets cleared and "re-fed" when you post the challenge board.

To start, you need to select a vcenter that you want to count challenge voters into. This is typically a vcenter with all report precincts, but doesn't have to be. When you press the "Select" button, you are selecting the vcenter that you are counting the challenge ballots into. This can be the same vcenter in which they are counted (which is what you'd do in Gaston this time) or it can be a separate vote center with its own counter group more typically. Note the similarity to the setup where you have real paper challenge ballots you want to count with GEMS central count. The selection dialog currently lists all vote centers, but the intent is to have a "Challenge" count method added to the vcenter dialog so it can list just the challenge ones, just like central count does for CC vcenters. Since we are past set-for-election, that will have to wait though.

After the vcenter to count the challenge ballots into is selected, then GEMS goes out and collects the challenge ballots from all vote centers that have been currently uploaded. You then select which ballots you want to review and accept. If you review all ballots (accepting some and reject some), and then upload some more ballots, the newly uploaded ballots will show up the next time you run the challenge board as not reviewed.

Clearing a challenge vcenter clears removed all ballots from the selected vcenters "deck", and restores the state back to "not reviewed". Well, that is what its supposed to do anyway.

Finally, as an "advanced" feature, you can choose to count your challenge ballots into more than one vcenter. This is just like setting up more than one central count vote center. If you review a ballot into one vcenter, you can only change its accepted status in that vcenter. Basically, GEMS prevents you from accepting a ballot into more than one vcenter, and winding up with duplicate counts. The "Reviewed In" text box displays the vcenter in which the ballot is reviewed/counted. The "Recorded In" text box shows the vcenter and machine in which the ballot was recorded. If this all sounds complicated, you can fairly safely ignore it east of the Rockies. Just select the same vcenter (single) vcenter to count into every time.

Ken

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