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Tyler:
In my discussions with most
of the Alaska customers a Service area usually only applied to maintenance type
issues such as road service, animal control, etc.
They sometimes would have
Fire Service districts and hospital boards. It would seem that all other
district - assembly, legislatve and so on would be handled the same as anyone
elses. Are they confusing the need for the shadowed races in "service
areas" and thinking all of their districts will have to be treated as a
service area?
Do they
have a need for a Non-Service area district because some precincts are split by
service area boundaries? If not do they need it? Wouldn't all all shadowed races
per their requirment be area wide?
Mechanics: I'm not sure that
"double count" is the terminology we want to use. The vote is not so
much counted twice as it is applied to two districts. Once as a citizen of
Alaska and once as a citizen of the district to be taxed for the
service.
Other Questions:
2 - The non-service area category would be used
if a precinct is split by service area boundaries.
3 - If ther were an area in the precinct outside
of the service area but no base precinct (split) were assigned, then you would
not get the ballot you desired.
I hope this helps a little
and we can accomodate teir needs. When I mer with the Anchorage folks in October
they seem to really want our system if it can do what they
need.
Thanks: Don
----Or
Hey
everyone,
I wanted to post text from
this letter from Anchorage and get some commentary. I will post on it
myself later. John McLaurin is requesting advice on the matter so he
can respond to Anchorage's letter. This is what Anchorage
wrote:
My staff and I have reviewed your letter. We think we
understand but aren't sure. So, I'm going to try to put in words what we
think it means using terms we commonly use for our elections. Let me know if
we've misunderstood.
1. Definitions:
- Jurisdiction wide = Areawide: Means a race or
proposition that everybody votes on and for which there is only one
tally.
- Service area: Means a race or proposition that only
persons within a certain geographic area vote on. The term could also be
used to refer to Assembly districts and limited road service area races
and propositions.
- Non-service area: Means…..We're not sure. We
don't think we would have an occasion to use this since votes cast by
people who are outside a particular service area would be tallied in the
jurisdiction wide/areawide column. It's unclear what this category was
designed to accommodate.
- Shadow race: Means a jurisdiction wide/areawide race or
proposition that has a service area vote tally subset companion.
- Shadowed race: Means a jurisdiction wide/areawide race
or proposition for which votes are tallied in a service area and is
linked to a shadow race.
- Shadow/shadowed = Areawide/service area: Means a race
or proposition for which votes are tallied in the jurisdiction
wide/areawide column and also in the service area column.
2. Understanding of Mechanics:
- The Shadow controls the shadowed race or proposition so
that once the link is made, the counting instructions follow along with
the jurisdiction wide/areawide race or proposition, regardless of how
the layout is manipulated.
- Vote tallies for the shadow race or proposition are
jurisdiction wide/areawide and include the subset tally of votes in the
shadowed race.
- Vote tallies for the shadowed race are the subset of
votes cast in a service area.
- The system will generate ballot artwork and set up
counting criteria so that votes on a given race or proposition can be
tallied in the jurisdiction wide/areawide column only as well as
"double counted" in the jurisdiction/areawide column and
service area column. For example if 50 votes are cast in a shadow race
and 25 of those votes are cast on ballots with the shadowed race the
vote tally would read: Jurisdiction wide/areawide - 50 votes. Service
area votes: 25.
If we've interpreted the definitions correctly and made the
right assumptions, it appears you've accommodated the "vote once count
twice concept". However, we have a few questions left.
1. Is there a limit to the number of shadow/shadowed races
or propositions that can be assigned within a precinct? At this point, we
have one precinct in which there are seven base precincts and at least five
of these would involve shadow propositions.
2. What is the purpose of the non-service area
category?
3. Database #1 created two ballot styles until "printed
with precinct ID's" which then doubled the number of ballot styles
generated. Is that a manual process or is it controlled through the
assignment of base precinct identifiers?
4. When Vickie and I were in McKinney for training last
January, we identified all base precincts for the 114 precincts in
Anchorage. I think Tyler kept a disk and gave us a copy too. Would it be
possible to run that set up with the enhanced software and send us a copy of
the resulting base precinct report? If the report can be run, will it show
which service area propositions would be shadowed within the
precincts?
On another note, I would like to thank you and the staff at
Global for your efforts to make it possible for Anchorage to use your
product. We've been working toward this end for about 18 months now and we
seem very close to actually running our local election on the Accuvote
system. However, we have no contract in place and we cannot take delivery of
the hardware/software until a contract is signed. As we discussed on the
phone, I understand your reluctance to sign a contract generated by the
municipality but surely you understand the municipality will not sign a
contract generated by Global. As Global has done with other jurisdictions,
it will be necessary to make some accommodations. I want to convey to you my
sense of urgency in this matter. To feel comfortable, I need to have a
contract in place by the end of January, 2000. Otherwise, the window for
this year's election will be missed. Quite frankly, if we don't make this
window I don't intend to pursue the purchase further. I don't mean to be
cantankerous but there's not much incentive for me to learn a new vote
system when I only plan on directing the next two (2000 and 2001) local
elections.
Lejane Ferguson, Municipal
Clerk
Anchorage wrote this letter
based upon an e-mail (excerpted below) which I sent to John which explained
the functionality and the testing conducted.
Here is the explanation of the materials I
gave you from the Anchorage testing. First, some background information on
the functionality itself. This is an excerpt from Ken’s e-mail on the
topic:
(This) RCR (is) essentially a "vote once
count twice" paradigm. GEMS now has new race types Shadow and
Shadowed to accomplish this. Shadowed races sit on the ballot
exactly on top of some precinct-wide shadow race. That is, they
"shadow" the real race. The catch is that shadowed races can have
different parties or split districts, and can hence generate different card
ids even though the artwork "looks" the same. On reports, shadowed
races appear just like any other race.
The user interface
for creating shadow races is a little like recall races. To use shadow
races, you need to set up a shadow race that is on all cards of a
precinct. For Anchorage, the shadow race would be an area wide district
race.
Next, create shadowed races
and set the controlling race to the shadow race. Shadowed races do not have
a candidate tab, nor have any layout options. These are maintained by the
controlling race. The shadowed races should be set up for some subset of the
ballots in the precinct. For Anchorage, it would be a race with the service
area district, and might split some precincts.
When ballots are generated, separate cards
will be created for the splits/parties of the shadowed races. You don't need
to do anything special in layout. If you manually move a shadow race on a
card, the shadowed race will be automatically "moved" with it. The
shadowed races are not actually drawn, but layout and download know they are
there.
There is no need for any ROM upgrade to take
advantage of shadow races. To the AccuVote they are just races on the card
that happen to have the same voting positions. We are still working on the
AccuVote 2.0 firmware that will provide an alternate way of handling
California and Alaska, but in the mean time shadow races will do the trick
without the necessity of a ROM upgrade.
The AccuVote-TS doesn't yet support
shadow races. We'll get to that in plenty of time for early voting in
California however.
For the first
database I created for this testing (which had only one double count
question – the Hinterlands Water Question) there are three districts:
Jurisdiction Wide, Non-Service Area, and Service Area. I created three
precincts, one completely out of the Service Area (named precinct 1 and ID
numbered 10), one completely in the Service Area (named precinct 2 and ID
numbered 20), one split by Service Area and Non-Service Area (named precinct
3 and ID numbered 30). I created four races; race 10 is a candidate race
assigned to the Jurisdiction Wide district, race 20 is a candidate race
assigned to the Non-Service Area district, race 30 is a shadow race
assigned to the Jurisdiction Wide district which contains the text of the
Hinterlands Water Question, race 40 is a shadowed race assigned to
the Service Area district and controlled by race 30. This creates two ballot
styles, four when printed with precinct ID’s (which the ballots used
for the testing were). These were tested using memory cards from each of the
three precincts to produce the results tapes and election night reports
which you have.
For the second
database I created for this testing (which had two double count questions
– the Hinterlands Water Question and the Northwoods Fire Question)
there are three districts: Jurisdiction Wide, Water Service Area, and Fire
Service Area. I created one precinct with four splits ("base
precincts" to use the correct GEMS terminology). One base precinct is
Out of the Water district and Out of the Fire district, one base precinct is
Out of the Water district and In the Fire district, one base precinct is In
the Water district and Out of the Fire district, and one base precinct is In
the Water district and In the Fire district. I created five races; race 10
is a candidate race assigned to the Jurisdiction Wide district, race 30 is a
shadow race assigned to the Jurisdiction Wide district which contains
the text of the Hinterlands Water Question, race 40 is a shadowed
race assigned to the Water district and controlled by race 30, race 50
is a shadow race assigned to the Jurisdiction Wide district which
contains the text of the Northwoods Fire Question, race 60 is a shadowed
race assigned to the Fire district and controlled by race 50. This
creates four ballot styles which were tested using a memory card from the
one precinct to produce the results tapes and election night reports which
you have.
I think Anchorage has it pretty much
correct. Like I said, I will post on it later. Sorry for the big
to-do but John wanted to get our input. Thanks, y'all
Tyler
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