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Re: Race Label on LCD (was RE: Jefferson County, KY)



 
Jefferson County would also like the race I.D. which appears on the Accu-Vote LCD when a ballot is rejected because a race is overvoted/undervoted to be the name of the race, not the race I.D. number.
Guy should probably comment on this one.  I think the basic problem is that the race label will not in general fit on the LCD screen.  The AV is capable of "scrolling" long text though.  Another possibility is to do the trick that central count does and put a ".." in the middle of long names.  As in "Presi..lican" or similar.Anyway, seems reasonable enough to me.  We would probably want to display both the id and label though.  Guy?
  Certainly reasonable from the user's POV.  Unfortunately it's the implementation that's the trick.  So how about I list some options and then anybody with opinions can post them?

  Let's start with a single display and then consider blinking later.  We need one line, preferably the first, to report why the Accu-Vote is returning the ballot (i.e. "BLANK VOTED RACE").  That leaves us the 16 characters on the second line to report both the race ID and the race title.  Currently that line is "  RACE # 16  ".  The Accu-Vote stores 2 lines of 24 characters for the race title.  In VTS, the second line is normally used for specifying the number to vote for while GEMS doesn't seem to use it at present.  Some options:

1) Race#/Colon/EndTruncatedName - "16:UNITED STATES" for UNITED STATES SENATOR.

2) Race#/Colon/MidTruncatedName - "16:UNITED..NATOR".

3) Race#/Colon/StartTruncatedName - "16:TATES SENATOR".

4) Race#/Colon/InitialsMidTruncatedName - "37:S S 7TH DIST" for STATE SENATOR- 7TH DIST.

  All of these have tradeoffs and any one rule will be inappropriate for some cases.  Looking at various titles, option 4 would normally be recognizable.

  One other possibility is to blink between 2 or more displays.  This is already used in feeder mode in order to display the reject message and an operator prompt: "PRESS YES BUTTON & RE-READ BALLOT".  It would be possible although possibly messy to add another blinked display.  Here we could blink between the current display and whatever we can display of the 2 lines of race title.  In feeder mode it would be blinking between 3 different displays.  Thus you could get:

5)

UNDEFINED MARK
     RACE # 23

<blink>

REPRESENTATIVE I
N U.S. VOTE FOR

<blink>

PRESS YES BUTTON
& RE-READ BALLOT

<blink> and back to the first display.

  Please reply with your comments to the RCR list.

              Guy
--
Guy Lancaster <glanca@dieboldes.com>
Global Election Systems Inc., Victoria, B.C., Canada
Phone: (250)995-8627