----- Original Message -----
Sent: Wednesday, October 24, 2001 11:11
AM
Subject: RE: CA baseheads
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