[EM] Does IRV elect "majority winners?"

[Abd ul-Rahman Lomax]

At 02:35 PM 1/8/2009, Dave Ketchum wrote:

>>I'd imagine it would be somewhat like this: You have an OCR 
>>mechanism that's been tested on numbers written in various styles. 
>>It either returns "this is [number]" or "I don't know what it is", 
>>with very stringent requirements on the number being correct if it 
>>gives the first output. If it returns "I don't know what it is", 
>>send the ballot to a manual fallback to check what number it really is.
>>This won't work if the OCR's so bad it returns "I don't know what 
>>it is" more often than it returns an actual result, or if the 
>>manufacturers don't bother to follow the accuracy requirements and 
>>states don't bother to verify them (Diebold all over again). Also, 
>>I'd prefer the counting function to be isolated in hardware so that 
>>all it gets is the number (so that there's no way it can cheat).

We used to have ballots here, where the voter wrote the candidate's 
name on the ballot. Back when there may have been literacy 
requirements for voting....

Marking boxes is far less ambiguous. I sometimes can't figure out 
what number I meant to write.... I shudder to think of what a mess it 
would be in a major election here to be using handwritten numbers on ballots.