Great! I did not
realize that the Minolta was capable of meeting your various ballot
tolerance requirements. This is a great improvement over the 5SI.
This news will be
of particular interest to Jeff Hintz, who used the 5SI in elections last
year. I have attached two mails posted to the support list regarding his
experience for reference. I am glad to hear that the Minolta will put
these problems to rest.
Consider the scaling
feature added to GEMS -- I'll do it today (its trivial). It will be in the
1.12.1 release.
Ken
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- To: <support@dieboldes.com>
- Subject: BOD & Duplexing
- From: "Jeff Hintz" <jhhintz@worldnet.att.net>
- Date: Thu, 15 Oct 1998 13:09:55 -0500
- Importance: Normal
Hi All, I talked with HP yesterday, and they seem to feel that the duplexing is within their tolerances with the stretching of the image on the duplexed side of the paper. They recommended moving up the offsets on the duplexed side, which then gives me a little bit off at the top and also a little bit off at the bottom. Seems to be OK, although I have the customers still checking the ballot when they fold on the score to see if the score goes through an oval. I don't have any problem with the ballot being read by the Accu-Vote, even when the image is stretched. My problem is that when I line up the timing marks at the top for both the back and front, the image stretches on the duplexed side, and sometimes the score of the ballot lands in an oval. When I do blank ballot testing, the Accu-Vote can sometimes read the score as a mark. I don't know if the Accu-Vote is actually reading the score, or some of the toner rub off that comes from the score, or both. I am using the 90 lb. card stock that is provided by Adkins. It looks like the paper is cut wrong sometimes, as well as the score lines are off sometimes too. There also is toner rub off. I ran the test deck that I created for Lancaster, NE today, 307 ballots. I ran it once, and the totals came out fine. I ran it a second time, and I received some overvotes as well as some votes for a candidate. This happened in only two races, but if we have to do a recount, what would be the integrity of the count??? Is there a way that we can adjust the Accu-Vote reading of the ballot so we do not pick up hesitation marks, toner rub off, or scored lines??? One other note, I noticed that the printing of the ovals from RX Laser seem to be thicker than the printing of the ovals in Gems. While doing a blank ballot test, I picked up a udef on a race that the ovals were completely blank, without any scores or toner. Jeff Hintz Global Election Systems
- To: <support@dieboldes.com>
- Subject: Ballot on Demand
- From: "Jeff Hintz" <jhhintz@worldnet.att.net>
- Date: Thu, 12 Nov 1998 11:10:40 -0500
- Importance: Normal
Hi All, After a lot of testing and running of elections with the Ballot on Demand system and the Accu-Vote/Accu-Feed systems, I have come to several conclusions that I both wish to comment on and get feedback for. It seems to be pretty much impossible to be able to print to spec from the HP5siHM Laser Jet Printer when duplexing, whether using the RX Laser software or using GEMS. Although the Accu-Vote is still able to read the ballot, the problem is that the toner is rubbing off from the ballot which the Accu-Vote can sometimes read as marks. Especially when the fold is either on or close to an oval. For example, I created a test deck for Lancaster, NE, around 300 ballots, not folded, and used duplexing. I first ran all the blank ballots through the Accu-Feed with the blank test, and all was successful. Then I marked these ballots and ran them again, and all totals came out fine. But when I ran the ballots a second, third, and fourth time, the totals never came out the same again. In Shelby, TN, we sorted overvotes and kicked out probably around 20 ballots due to toner rub off. When the customer folds the ballot, it makes the toner rub off even worse, especially when they have a lot of text. Also, the toner tends to rub off onto the feed rollers of the Accu-Feeder and then the rollers become slick and cannot pick up the ballots. Both Accu-Feeders in Douglas & Lancaster, NE started out picking up the ballots fine, but after several hundred ballots they began to slip and needed help in feeding. Is this happening in Pima or King, or do they use ballots printed by a printing company? It took approximately 8 hours to scan around 5500 ballots on 2 Accu-Feeders in Douglas, NE; is that good or bad? Another note: Douglas, NE will be doing a recount on December 1, 1998, and all the absentees need to be run again. I suspect that it not only will take about 8 hours again, but the count will change due to the toner rub off. Here are some suggestions both from the three accounts mentioned above, and myself. All 3 accounts only used paper ballots for their postal absentee, and each emphasized that it would be much easier and cost effective to use 20 lb. bond paper, (that you can buy from an office supply store), rather than the heavy paper we supply. I think that this would help considerably with the toner rub off that I experienced. Would it be possible to enhance the Accu-Vote & Accu-Feeder to be able to do this? This is the first time that I created postscript files from Gems and sent them to RX Laser to convert for their BOD system. I did not get a very timely turn around for these files, and they were never able to convert the Douglas, NE files. Again, as mentioned earlier, using the RX Laser BOD software did not help for printing to spec while duplexing, and when the ballots were printed shading and fonts were a lot different than Gems. Other than the fact that RX Laser can print the ballots faster, I see no real benefit to doing all this work for RX Laser to convert the files and send back a CD for you to install their software. I think that with a few enhancements, Gems could do exactly the same thing and we wouldn't have to be waiting or paying for RX Laser to do the job. Another issue is the processing speed it takes to run the absentee ballots. Douglas County, NE especially commented on this, again as mentioned above, it took 8 hours to process their absentee ballots Jeff Hintz Global Election Systems