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Guy (and Steve),
Your points are all excellent and
well-taken. Since this is now venturing into the realm of
development/fiscal policy (and especially since it involves a dealer), I am
letting go of this request. Someone with greater authority than me can
take this information to the customer (LHS), negotiate the substantive issues
with them, and figure out what actions to take, how to prioritize, etc. I
believe that this rcr is for the sake of convenience and not in response to a
statutory requirement.
Some pertient contact information: Gerry Bergeron's
e-mail address is linkgb@aol.com
Tyler
Allow me to clarify a bit.
LHS doesn't necessarily want to have the results tape show number of
Democratic ballots cast. Understood.
They want to be able to
edit what appears on the tape. Therein lies the
problem. There is currently no mechanism for this so supporting it
would mean non-trivial changes to GEMS, to the communication protocols, to
the Accu-Vote firmware, to the memory card format, and to the Accu-Basic
report programs.
Steve Knecht wrote:
This sounds like you are asking for a "label"
field for the Card No. Is that the case? Plus ability to select
whether the number or the label appears on the bottom of the
tape? Well said. I would suggest that
selecting which report file to download would be sufficient to "select
whether the number or the label appears". Most of the reports
print the card summary at the top on the long version of the report so it is
only on some of the custom versions that it is printed on the bottom.
If you/they really want the whole package, then we're talking
several days work in a coordinated effort between the GEMS and the Accu-Vote
programmers. Currently we have other priorities but eventually we
could consider this. The question then is who wants to pay for this
work. If it's wanted by everyone or required by state law, the company
usually absorbs the costs. Otherwise the customer is expected to pay.
My suggestion to add the party code, taken from one of the races,
to the card number would be much cheaper and could be slipped in in short
order. It's far from perfect, it's just a hack, but it might be useful
enough to warrant the cost.
It's a good idea and possibly we could slip it in for some future
revision that also affected the same systems. Unfortunately it affects
too many systems to do it now on its own without major justification.
Even coming up with a firm estimate would take non-trivial work. Just
let us know.
Guy
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