Can optical scan ballots hold as many races as punch cards?

Sun Apr 24 2005 00:00:00 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time)

elections

Kathy (of USCountVotes) brings word that some maldoers in Utah are spreading election FUD.

Specifically, she alleges that lobbyists for Diebold are spreading a rumor that the AutoMark ballot marking device (BMD) cannot accomodate as many contests as their old punch card systems can. Presumably, this is to knock the AutoMark out of the RFP procurement of the upgrade to Utah's election equipment. With the help of a quick back-of-the-envelope calculation, I believe this to be wrong.

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So Utah uses the Votomatic punchcard system... however, there are a few different types of punch cards for that vendor's system. Check out Doug Jones great run down on punch cards.

The uppermost punch card on Doug's page is what we used to vote on here in Alameda county before we got AccuVote-TSs. It has 228 possible holes (although I'm not sure if you can set up a punch card ballot display -- the thing that flips to expose the next column of holes -- for that many elections... I don't see why not.)

So, how many votes can an optical scan ballot at 8.5" x 17" hold (both sides)? Well, here's a bunch of images of optical scan ballots:

http://www-personal.umich.edu/~mlafler/ballot.jpg http://the.honoluluadvertiser.com/dailypix/2002/Oct/28/ballot.gif http://www.ada.mi.us/images/Ballot-Front.jpg http://nw-ar.com/smokefree/ballot.gif http://kai.dyndns.org/images/ballot/ballot.jpg http://www.martin.fl.us/GOVT/co/elect/returns/sep98/ballot.gif

It seems safe to assume that the thickest they can pack choices is about 3 per inch and that each side has a total of 3 columns max. This is 3 votes per inch * 17" * 3 columns * 2 sides = 306 votes on a fully-packed op-scan ballot. This number drops to 204 votes if we assume only 2 votes per inch and 153 if we assume only one side at three votes per inch.

So, I'd say that they're comparable, to first order. And have we ever seen evidence of any race with more than 150 individual choices on it? Unless I'm mistaken, the California recall, at 135 candidates, was the longest ballot ever (please correct me if I'm wrong on this).