[Date Prev][Date Next] [Chronological] [Thread] [Top]

RE: CA baseheads



From: owner-support@gesn.com [mailto:owner-support@gesn.com]On Behalf Of Steve Knecht
Sent: Wednesday, October 24, 2001 11:02 AM
   
 
 I see a short label field (4-6 characters) to distinguish the race, and 18 characters or so for the first initial of candidate and last name on a single line.  I guess I'm thinking about how to accomplish this at this point rather than fight it.  The ignorance is again with the politicians and their staff, and the lack of horse power we have at that level.  
 
The only contrarian suggestion I have is to pry at the current language of the bill.  It says "paper version or representation of the voted ballot".  It doesn't actually say that this representation has to be human readable, it just says that it has to be paper.  So, by the letter of the act, it should be sufficient to encode the ballot bits into a barcode and print that on the tape.  This can be done very compact.
 
Now, this means the only way you can read the tape back it with a bar code reader.  So you would have to have a room full of people with bar code readers going over the tapes and adding them up by hand.  But maybe we could simplify this process, and give them a little utility to decode the bar codes give them a running total.  Or maybe there is a machine out that that has a feeder mechanism to read the bar codes off the tape without them having to use a wand, and then print out the totals.
 
Nevermind.
 
Ken