Re: Gems - New Feature - Cards Cast Option for Reporting

[Guy Lancaster <glanca@gesn.com>]

Jeff Hintz wrote:

The new feature of Cards Cast at the top of the Summary Report is very nice. However, the real intention is for that new feature to be the actual Voter Turnout or Ballots Cast or Total Number of Voters or whatever name you wish to give it, not the total number of Cards that go through the Accu-Vote.In the case of an election where the Voter gets 2 cards to make up a ballot, the Voter Turnout is only able to be determined by the Ballots Cast total that is within one of the County Wide races.Could we add with this new feature a check box or something to be able to tell Gems which Voter Group to keep track of, so the Voter Turnout is correct???

  Perhaps we could but it wouldn't provide what you're looking for.  I know it seems simple in concept but it doesn't work since there is no way that we can link the cards that make up a ballot.

  The best that we can do is to report the minimum number of voters that could explain the cards cast.  This could detect ballot stuffing but otherwise is not very useful.  We did this once but it didn't satisfy what people wanted.  In fact it created even more confusion as people attempted to explain the inconsistencies so finally we removed it.  This is essentially what you are trying to revive and, unless you can force every voter to cast the cards with the county wide races, it won't work properly.

  The only way that we could report the number of voters would be to somehow identify new voters to the Accu-Vote.  This could be done with header cards (a ballot start card?) akin to a poll worker resetting the lever machine between voters.  Or it could require that all cards of each ballot be cast before accepting a new ballot (but what if the second card is rejected?).  There are possibilities but they have serious tradeoffs and I don't think anyone wants to start back down this path.

          Guy