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I am assuming that it won't take too much effort
to make the changes we are contemplating. Otherwise, I don't know why we
are wasting our time discussing it. Tell Jefferson County to give their
pollworkers a list of races by race ID number and to train their pollworkers to
work from the list. This would be no more confusing than the scrolling or
truncating that is being suggested here. I don't mean to belittle anyone's
efforts towards solving the problem, everything I've read on this topic is
creative and reflects the kind of excellent response we have to our
customers. But if Jefferson County's pollworkers can't be trained to know
that "RACE #37" means "State Senate 7th District" as
detailed on a list, I seriously doubt they could be trained to interpret
"37:S S 7TH DIST" either (not that I am picking on that particular
suggestion). I do not think we should spend company resources trying to
fix this.
Tyler
2)
Race#/Colon/MidTruncatedName -
"16:UNITED..NATOR". This one I understand and
prefer.
4)
Race#/Colon/InitialsMidTruncatedName - "37:S S 7TH DIST"
for STATE SENATOR- 7TH DIST. This one I don't follow though. What the rules for
initials and mid truncation? What gets printed for "For the
office of the president and vice president" and
"This-Is-A-Strange-Race-Label"? Anyway, if you can come
up with some rules that generate something more legible than option 2, I
am all for it. Legibility is
going to be a subjective measurement since I find option 4 more legible than
2 in the few cases that I've considered. Rather like those word
puzzles, some people get some, others get others. I work better with
the beginning of a word than with the end. And I find that the most
useful part of most race titles is at the end.
As for rules, I'll make a stab at an algorithm.
4a) Truncate the end of each word (delimiters (i.e. a space, dash, etc.)
to be defined) until either the text fits the display or we're down to an
initial. Keep the delimiter. This would actually produce
"37:S SE 7TH DIST" in the above example which looks admittedly
like "SOUTH SOUTH-EAST 7TH DIST".
How about a compromise?
4b) Truncate the middle-end of each word until either the text fits
with ".." in the middle of the word or we're down to an
initial. Keep the delimiter. This should give the original
example in option 4 above. For "16:UNITED STATES SENATOR" we
get "16:U S SENATOR". For "52:REPRESENTATIVE IN
U.S." we get "52:RE..E IN U.S.". Like I said, there
will always be examples which don't work.
Any other suggestions?
Guy
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Guy Lancaster <glanca@dieboldes.com>
Global Election Systems Inc.,
Victoria, B.C., Canada
Phone: (250)995-8627
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