On Thu, Aug 28, 2008 at 12:00 PM, James Gilmour <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Here in Scotland there is a somewhat "hidden" debate that must be had. > STV-PR was introduced for local government elections in > 2007. The counting rules adopted (Weighted Inclusive Gregory Method for > consequential transfers) make electronic counting almost > obligatory. (Manual counting to WIGM rules is possible, but long and tedious > because so many ballot papers have to be sorted and > counted again and again.) So we used scanners, OCR conversion and e-counting.
That is similar to Abd's ballot imaging suggestion. I assume that the images used for the OCR aren't made available to the public? > The Scottish Government is promoting further use of > STV-PR for various directly elected bodies. This is raising issues about the > long-term provision of the equipment necessary for > e-processing of the ballot papers for all these different public elections > and about the software that will be used for scanning, > OCR and counting. This can be solved by just publishing the ballot images. This way everyone can work out their own result. > Concerns about "black box" processing have been somewhat muted so far, but > there have been calls for all blank > ballot papers to be subject to individual adjudication by the Returning > Officer under scrutiny of the candidates and their agents. > This is an example of the ridiculous double-standards that are being applied > to e-processing, because straightforward blank ballot > papers would never be subject to Returning Officer adjudication in a manual > count. A blank ballot is one that has no writing on it, or one that is not used? ---- Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
