It does not matter what voting system you run. If you use Clearcast, or any other vendor this is a test that needs to be run to insure the election was not altered in favor of any candidate.
Take a ballot – fill out all the candidate blocks for an office EG. Governor, Senator, House, Local, etc. – these need to be done for each office and then run. This will require a few ballots to test if there is favor for any office as a ‘programmed error result’. One final sheet with all candidates filled out as well.
These sample ballots can also be a mix and match of having candidate spaces not filled out, to see what the result is when run through the Vote Counter. All the possibilities and cases should be documented before and after an election to insure the systems are good.
Scan the ballots that had all the boxes filled and if the result increments for a candidate, that Voting system is compromised. If all the boxes in the ballot are filled, it should not have a preference for any candidate and should return an error if programmed correctly. These systems should not have a default affinity for a candidate if all the possible candidates are chosen for a position, and the ballot needs to be removed for that count for that race because there is no way to know who should have gotten that vote. This ballot should be striken/spoiled versus increment for any candidate.
This should be done on all Voting systems, recorded, and have people from both parties watching to see what results. This is a test that should be done and pre and post election on a system to insure there is no preference that as a result of an error would increment a candidate. This is a test of the actual voting system to see if the results are being programmed for a ‘preference’ and the chain of custody of those that worked on the systems reviewed.
This should be recorded for records at local Board of Elections to insure election integrity.