No Mandates Colorado

Forwarded from The Lone Raccoon (Lady Raccoon)

POLARIS NEWS!!!

First, we have been getting many complaints about how slow Polaris is running. There are a few factors that are causing this. One is that we have had terrible thunder storms that has knocked out our power often. For years, we have joked that Florida Power and Light should be renamed Florida Flicker and Flash. Every time this happens, the servers shut down to protect themselves from damage. Then they go through the process of checking for updates, which takes time. By the time they come back up to full capacity, I've already gotten 10 emails from people who are having trouble getting to Polaris. This is one reason why.

Second, everyone is now working on Douglas County, Colorado. There are many problems with this county - even more than there were in Alachua. If you are having trouble with images loading, wait a minute. If the image doesn't load, reload the page and move on. Don't wait so long that your session on Polaris times out and you have to login again. One reason for the long load times is because there are 2 types of scans of the ballot images. The one is from election day when the ballots were run through the election scanners. The others were rescanned by hand by a team in Douglas County who scanned them at a much higher resolution. These images are at a much higher resolution than Polaris was designed to handle so the image files are huge. Add that to the fact that the server issues we are having and your wait times can be lengthy. Jeff is working on the code for Polaris to account for the larger image files, but this is just one thing he is working on, so the fix will come, but I don't know how long it will take. For now, just keep plugging away as you can and try to deal with the frustration. It will get better eventually.

Third, the leader boards will not be accurate any longer because Douglas County is on a different server than the other Polaris counties. We will combine them into an accurate count, but for now, that is not a priority. I asked Jeff to do some tweaking of the leader boards about 2 years ago and those ideas are still on his to do list. They will get done... or they won't. But the world won't stop spinning if the boards aren't accurate.

Lastly, we've had lots of requests for results from previous counties. I'd like to let you know what happens on our end with each county.
Before a county is open for you to adjudicate, we must first load the ballot images. IF WE DON'T RUN INTO PROBLEMS, it can take several days to several weeks for the servers to get all of the images loaded in a usable form, depending on how big the county is. Then, there is the initial administration where every race and every possible candidate must be defined as an option for you to select. This means checking the ballot for every precinct to make sure we have all available candidates for you to choose. This takes me a day or two at least. Then the county must be opened for adjudication. (There is more that goes into it, but this is enough to get the idea.)

Once adjudication is complete, Jeff runs a comparison check to make sure that all selections match between the 2 people who have looked at that ballot. If the selections do not match or if there are comments on that ballot, the image is pulled into the admin file. Every one of those ballots are then examined by me to decide how to resolve whatever the issue was. This is a very time consuming process and even small counties have taken me days to wade through. The bigger the county, the longer it takes.

Once administration is complete, we need to run the analysis and then look for potential "problems". This is very brain intensive and needs to be done when we aren't tired or distracted. After we've looked at the analysis, we write the reports.

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