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Politics : Just the Facts, Ma'am: A Compendium of Liberal Fiction -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Orcastraiter who wrote (23654)	12/26/2004 12:59:28 PM
From: Lazarus_Long	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 90947

Dear dunce: The old IBM card sorting and counting equipment predates software (at least working, commercial software; forget Lady Lovelace and Babbage) by decades. The first "software" consisted of wireboards connecting electronic components and came about towards the end of WW2; IBM's Hollerith card counters and sorters had been available for decades by then and were in use by corporations. maxmon.com Punch-card voting was widely in use during the 20th century and became the dominant method of voting by the 1980ís [Jones]. This technique requires voters to form a chad on the ballot next to the selected candidateís name using a small punching device. These dimpled ballots, shown in Figure 2, are fed into computer-tabulating machines, and stored in case a recount is necessary. According to Kevin Bensor, ìFulton and De Kalb Counties in Georgia were the first jurisdictions to use punch cards and computer tally machines when they adopted the system for the 1964 primary election.î Punch-card machines remain popular today; in the 1996 presidential election, some variation of the system was used by 37.3% of registered voters in the United States courses.cs.vt.edu No software is needed in a punch card counter; mechanical counting such as was done by the old mechanical adding machines is quite adequate. Even given the presence of systems using software, prevention of fraud is possible. The software can be loaded shortly before the election, then the load dumped onto tape or a printout to prevent bias in the software. A paper print-out can be given to each voter and also a copy kept by the machine for verification.