Indeed, pixel scanning voting technology that captures complete ballot images that can be interpreted using standard form-reading software allows for ANY improved voting method AND increases election integrity by having a redundant paper and machine record of every vote (making fraud extremely difficult, since TWO records would need to be falsified). And this is not a wish for the future, but happening right now. Several current election administration companies (mainly running union elections) use such a system currently, and at least one voting machine vendor (Avante, which just won a huge contract to supply voting machines to the Philippines) has such a system already federally tested in the U.S.
Terry Bouricius ----- Original Message ----- From: "Raph Frank" <[email protected]> To: "Kristofer Munsterhjelm" <[email protected]> Cc: "Dave Ketchum" <[email protected]>; "EM" <[email protected]> Sent: Wednesday, March 18, 2009 8:55 AM Subject: Re: [EM] IRV proponents figure out how to make IRV precinct-summable On Wed, Mar 18, 2009 at 10:26 AM, Kristofer Munsterhjelm <[email protected]> wrote: > In > effect, one decouples the calculation (determining the winners) from the > counting (determining what people actually voted), and one can thus > alter > one without necessarily having to alter the other. Adb's ballot imaging idea takes this to the extreme. With pattern recognition software, you could support virtually any voting method. The "counting" process would just produce a list of numbers corresponding to each ballot. In its most simple form, you would just need a pattern recognition program that can recognise the numbers 0 to 9 and maybe also the letter X (for "place an X next to your favourite candidate"). As long as the ballots are designed to make this easy, it shouldn't be that difficult a task. There would be a box provided for each number that the voter fills in. I wrote some software that is a basic attempt at this. However, it only gives 70% ish accuracy. See: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/RangeVoting/files/Ballot%20image/ The circles are used to align the image and the black rectange at the top is used to work out where the top of the ballot is. I think if there was demand, it should be possible to make this software much more accurate, since it doesn't have to worry about most of the complexities of handwriting recognition. It wouldn't have to separate out letters as each 'box' would only contain one number and there are only 10 possibilities. Also, since each box would be in a known position on the page, it would be able to figure out where each letter is located. ---- Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info ---- Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
