You want me to count what?!

May 4, 2006 12:56 PM

What's a good and free software solution for counting up hand written ballots?

Boss gone crazy.

We ran a contest on paper ballots, with the idea we'd count them by figuring only on a 100 at the extreme most.

The response was HUGE, way larger than we thought it would be and now the idea of doing it by hand seems insane. Can anyone recommend a php script or excel spreadsheet or online form or some such for a temp to enter in all those data on a ballot by ballot basis? The best solution would be a way to easily add new fields for the categories, since a lot of it is handwritten.

Naturally we need it like yesterday 'cause this just blew our deadlines.

posted by Brandon Blatcher to Computers & Internet (13 answers total)

What kind of data are you talking? Essay answers to vague questions, or something that can be condensed to something like a excellent, good, fair, poor set, or?
posted by edgeways at 1:31 PM on May 4, 2006

Response by poster: One line answers to questions.

For instance:

Who is your favorite writer?

then a slot for a person to type something in.

Repeat ad nausem for lots of questions.

Naturally, the back end would be able to count the votes in order of popularity so the result for this one question might look likeL

Jackie Collins 46
Herb Mcdonadls 32
Ed McBain 32

etc, etc.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 1:39 PM on May 4, 2006

You could quickly set up an Access database if you've got the Microsoft at your office.
posted by Roger Dodger at 1:47 PM on May 4, 2006

Response by poster: No access in the office. We do have filemaker though, which I assume could do the same?

Any quick hints on how to do this?
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 1:51 PM on May 4, 2006

sort the ballots by type, ie all for a in 1 stack, all for b in a second, etc. Repeat as necessary. The sooner you start, the sooner you'll be done.

as for an easy software solution? even optical scanners on documents made for them have problems sometimes. an easy free solution after the fact probably does not exist.
posted by lester at 2:04 PM on May 4, 2006

It's surprisingly easy to sort hundreds -- even thousands -- of ballots by hand. Just sort them into different piles (for each person), rotate after every 10. If there's more than one position, do this for one position at a time. I've done this for ~500 ballots in about 20 minutes.
posted by reklaw at 2:17 PM on May 4, 2006

I'd just batch process them per question, assuming there aren't that many questions - go through the whole stack for question 1, have a large piece of paper, if the answer doesn't exist write it on the paper and put a tick by it, if the answer does exist just put a tick. When you've gone through the whole pile, look at the piece of paper and whatever answer has the largest number of ticks wins. Get another sheet of paper, go through the whole stack for question 2, lather, rinse, repeat.

Even if there are thousands, with one reader and one ticker-offer, it ought to go rather quickly.
posted by jellicle at 2:19 PM on May 4, 2006

How important is accuracy? Count part of them and extrapolate.
posted by reynaert at 3:02 PM on May 4, 2006

why not use Excel, which has a handy form feature called 'data entry.' just type in some column headings in a simple spreadsheet, and then use menu bar to find the 'data entry' form. it will call up a dialog box that allows you to enter each ballot, tab-ing to each answer, then click one button for 'next entry.' ...and so on. makes for quick entry.

at the end, you can sort the table in a variety of ways (the whole table, not just a column), and then use the 'subtotals' fuction to get a list of frequencies for each entry.

without access handy, this is what i'd do...especially since you seem to have open-ended responses (much more tedious than yes/no's). good luck!
posted by garfy3 at 3:05 PM on May 4, 2006

While working on the election's committee for my University's students' union I created tabs sheets in exel that we used to count thousands of votes in numerous categories. That only took us a few hours, if you're only doing one category it should be quite easy.

The sheets basically had the names of the candidate, and then little ASCII chacater boxes you checked off for a vote. Put the boxes in sets of five, rows of one hundred, and you can fix a LOT on one a4 sized peice of paper. Or more to the point, enough.

One person reads out the ballots, two people keep count on the tabs sheets (with no reference to each other's sheets). Once you're done you double check and if the number's match you're good to go. With pen and paper you can go blazingly fast and since you're using premappe tabs sheets you don't have to count up the marks afterwards, just count the rows off, no there's no efforting in the actually tallying part.

You don't have an email in your profile, but if you want to email me I can send you an example tabs sheet that you could adapt.
posted by tiamat at 8:29 AM on May 5, 2006

Wait, are you saying it was a write in ballot? If so, then never mind my solution, which is geared towards a known list of candidates/answers.

"Hand written ballots" is unclear to me. I'm not sure whether you mean you they're just not scannable because people wrote iin their vote by hand, or you mean people could write in whatever they wanted.
posted by tiamat at 8:33 AM on May 5, 2006

Response by poster: It's means both: they could write whatever they wanted, by hand.

The Ballot looks like this:

Major Category (ex. Romance novels)
Sub Category (ex: Fav Couple): Space for handwritten answer, one per category.

There are about 50 categories.

So it's a matter of creating a digitial version of this, which a person can then sit down with and do data entry on, which will then count up and rank the entries for each sub category from most to least.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 8:16 AM on May 7, 2006

[woops, the thing i mentioned earlier in Excel is under the drop-down menu "data" --> "Form"... not "data entry"]
posted by garfy3 at 4:31 PM on May 8, 2006