[EM] Ballot design (new simple legal strategy to get IRV)

[Juho Laatu]

I believe computer recognition might work well enough to at least provide assistance to the humans by helping them recording the numbers. For example I might read the numbers myself first, and then check if the computer has the same opinion. If yes, then I press enter to proceed to the next ballot and accept computer's interpretation of the ballot. This would be "computer assisted counting".

I note that some ballots might contain numbers 1 and 7, and another ballot might contain numbers 1 and 7 as well, but the first 1 and the latter 7 might look exactly the same. One would need to make the interpretation based on seeing also the other numbers on the ballot. A different looking 7 would cause the 1 to be interpreted as 1 in the first ballot. The machines should be smart enough to take also this into account. Or alternatively they would just give up and leave the interpretation of these two ballots to humans.

Juho


> On 11 Oct 2015, at 01:00, Kristofer Munsterhjelm <km_elmet at t-online.de> wrote:
> 
> On 10/10/2015 11:43 PM, robert bristow-johnson wrote:
>> On 10/10/15 5:30 PM, Juho Laatu wrote:
>>>> On 11 Oct 2015, at 00:10, robert
>>>> bristow-johnson<rbj at audioimagination.com>  wrote:
>>>> 
>>>> On 10/9/15 4:00 AM, Juho Laatu wrote:
>>>>> I just note that there can be also simple ballots like in
>>>>> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_list (see the picture). If one
>>>>> wants to expand that to ranked ballots with high number of
>>>>> candidates, one could simply allow the voter to write multiple
>>>>> numbers in the ballot instead of only one. One could thus cast a
>>>>> ranked vote by writing few numbers, e.g. "23 74 74 5 234 321".
>>>>> 
>>>> and a machine is gonna scan that?
>>> Manual scan by default. In Finland the open list ballots (bullet
>>> votes) are counted today by hand right after the polling station
>>> closes (within say 1 hour). I'd propose to do the same also with the
>>> (extended) ranked ballots. With ranked ballots you need to introduce
>>> also computers to store the ranked data, and the process takes a bit
>>> longer.
>>> 
>>> Machine scanning could be used too if it is reliable enough. Maybe so
>>> that machines use human help for ballots whose interpretation is not
>>> obvious.
>>> 
>> 
>> listen, here in Vermont, i have worked on a few different election
>> recounts where we had to examine thousands of ballots by hand.  many
>> people mark even bubble or bullet ballots so poorly that even that fails
>> machine scanning.  i know there is Optical Character Recognition (OCR),
>> but i would not trust that to recognize numbers written by voters on
>> ballots.  numbers like "3" and "8" get confused.  and other pairs, like
>> "1" and "7" and "5" and "8".  or "5" and "6".
> 
> If you have check digits or checksums, that gets rid of most silent
> failures; how many they get rid of depends on what kind of errors you
> want to correct and how much redundancy you're willing to add to the ID
> - e.g using five-digit codes for ten candidates can handle more errors
> than using four-digit ones.
> 
> The machine could then signal an error if the ID doesn't read as valid
> to its software, and then have a manual counter (or multiple) verify the
> ID by hand.
> 
> I don't know how good handwriting recognition is at the moment, though;
> perhaps it would have to be all manual. But there are at least ways to
> avoid silent errors like one candidate being mistaken for another. I
> also imagine one could not use digits that look too alike, for instance
> using only the digits {1, 2, 4, 6, 8, 9}.
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