VTS does not allow candidate
oval positions to be 'entered' manually. What it does allow is, in the
BallotEditor, to move candidates to any unused voting location on the
ballot. This feature has been used a many times, ranging from the
rediculus, as in Venasuala, to the reasonable they want question responses
vertically verses horisonally placed on the ballot or they screwed up candidate
order and/or rotation. Some of these adjusements that were required in VTS
are no longer required in GEMS since it provides a better method of doing ballot
layout and more options than VTS did.
This would be a nice feature to have since it would allow us to tell
customers who have weird layouts that they can manually lay the ballots out, BUT
I would not suggest doing it until we get some very solid demand from the
support and or sales group
The major 'problem' with this is that GEMS stores the layout for the 'base'
rotation and then rotates the candidates through the set of positions defined
for the race. Therefor 'special' rotation fixes cannot be done using
this. Also GEMS, as does VTS, assumes the races are rectangular and that
the candidates are all contained within the race rectangle therfore it would be
more common to have races overlapping one another with all the inheirent weired
printing problems (race boxes being drawn overtop of other races, text overtop
of text etc).
If we were to implement this I would suggest allowing
the candidates to be moved within the race rectangle.
The manual adjustment is done on already layed out ballots. If those
ballots get automatically layed out again (due to some change causing the ballot
to be set as not layed out) then they are layed out using the normal method and
all manual changes would be lost.
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