----- Original Message -----
Sent: Wednesday, October 24, 2001 11:11
AM
Subject: RE: CA baseheads
I see a short label field (4-6 characters) to
distinguish the race, and 18 characters or so for the first initial of
candidate and last name on a single line. I guess I'm thinking about
how to accomplish this at this point rather than fight it. The
ignorance is again with the politicians and their staff, and the lack of
horse power we have at that level.
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