The
only contrarian suggestion I have is to pry at the current
language of the bill. It says "paper version or representation of the
voted ballot". It doesn't actually say that this representation has to be
human readable, it just says that it has to be paper. So, by the letter of
the act, it should be sufficient to encode the ballot bits into a barcode and
print that on the tape. This can be done very
compact.
Now, this
means the only way you can read the tape back it with a bar code reader.
So you would have to have a room full of people with bar code readers going over
the tapes and adding them up by hand. But maybe we could simplify this
process, and give them a little utility to decode the bar codes give them a
running total. Or maybe there is a machine out that that has a feeder
mechanism to read the bar codes off the tape without them having to use a wand,
and then print out the totals.
Nevermind.
Ken
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