[EM] IRV proponents figure out how to make IRV precinct-summable

[Raph Frank]

On Wed, Mar 18, 2009 at 10:26 AM, Kristofer Munsterhjelm
<km-elmet at broadpark.no> 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.