If you watch the news, I’m sure you are familiar with the infamous Palm Beach ballot. You may even have noticed that they are using a punched card as the ballot.
This is not a voting system unique to Palm Beach as we use the same system here in my county and no doubt in many other counties. But I can’t help thinking that this seems to be the only way that punched cards are used anymore.
Does anyone know of any other ways in which punched cards (aka Hollerith cards) are still in use?
In California the names were only on the left. Which is different than the Florida ones where the names were on both the left and the right.
Those ballots are not Hollerith cards. Hollerith cards are very specific in size, shape, and shape of the rectangular holes that are used to indicate letters and numbers and special characters.
The technology and principles for reading them may be similar, but they are not actual Hollerith cards.
The reason that the candidate’s names were on the left AND right on those ballots is that the font was enlarged to allow seniors to read it easily… seems to have backfired on them!
In Missouri, St. Louis County, the ballot was similar to Floridas. Candidates on both side of the punch row. I’d guess that the system is manufactured by the same supplier, although I don’t know if they also prepare the actual ballot pages.
I guess I didn’t ask the question very well. Or rather didn’t put enough emphasis on what I was really interested in.
It’s the uses (if any) of punched cards I want to know about. Does anyone know if they are still used in other applications these days?
As for the election cards not being standard Hollerith, yes, they are larger in both directions, I believe. And the holes are a different size. But the essentials of the technology are no different. And I’ll bet the card readers get jammed just as easily, if not more so. For this question, though, I’m interested in the uses of punched cards, whether standard Hollerith or not.