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Anchorage Service
Area tally (submitted by Tyler)
California
Presidential Preference (submitted by Rob)
These two RCRs are
complete and ready for testing. GEMS 1.14.1 will appear
shortly.
Both these RCRs are
essentially a "vote once count twice" paradigm. GEMS now has new race
types Shadow and Shadowed to accomplish this. Shadowed
races sit on the ballot exactly on top of some precinct-wide shadow
race. That is, they "shadow" the real race. The catch is
that shadowed races can have different parties or split districts, and can
hence generate different card ids even though the artwork "looks" the
same. On reports, shadowed races appear just like any other
race.
The user interface
for creating shadow races is a little like recall races. To use shadow
races, you need to set up a shadow race that is on all cards of a
precinct. For Anchorage, the shadow race would be an area wide
district race. For California, it would be a nonpartisan
race.
Next, create
shadowed races and set the controlling race to the shadow race.
Shadowed races do not have a candidate tab, nor have any layout options.
These are maintained by the controlling race. The shadowed races should be
set up for some subset of the ballots in the precinct. For Anchorage, it
would be a race with the service area district, and might split some
precincts. For California, create a shadowed race for each closed primary
party.
When ballots are
generated, separate cards will be created for the splits/parties of the
shadowed races. You don't need to do anything special in layout. If
you manually move a shadow race on a card, the shadowed race will be
automatically "moved" with it. The shadowed races are not actually drawn,
but layout and download know they are there.
There is no need for
any ROM upgrade to take advantage of shadow races. To the AccuVote they
are just races on the card that happen to have the same voting
positions. We are still working on the AccuVote 2.0
firmware that will provide an alternate way of handling California and Alaska,
but in the mean time shadow races will do the trick without the necessity of a
ROM upgrade.
The AccuVote-TS
doesn't yet support shadow races. We'll get to that in plenty of time for
early voting in California however.
Finally, GEMS 1.14.1
has a huge number of internal changes not all relating to shadow races. It
requires serious testing.
Questions and
suggestions welcome as always.
Ken
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