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

[Terry Bouricius]

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" <raphfrk at gmail.com>
To: "Kristofer Munsterhjelm" <km-elmet at broadpark.no>
Cc: "Dave Ketchum" <davek at clarityconnect.com>; "EM" 
<election-methods at lists.electorama.com>
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
<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.
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