Ballot ID, aka "scan anything"

[ion-oset]

Add identification marks to a ballot so that a scanner configured broadly for "an election" can scan any ballot style in that election. This can take several forms. Examples

• Barcode in the lower right corner
• OCR-friendly text in a predictable spot
• Template matching of the image of the header text on each ballot, i.e. no special markings, just go with the human readable text that identifies the ballot

[trustthevote]

I prefer not to use a barcode, and to have the text used for identification to be human comprehensive rather than (for example) an opaque string of chars that could encode anything.

The third option I am not sure I understand, because I don't know where an image comes in (except for the conventional placement of an image of state or county seal); I don't think that anyone has done that before; for that matter I don't think it has been done based human readable+comprehensible text at all

[brianolson]

Progress: can now extract image pixels of page headers; next up is aligning and matching a new unknown page to find the header that fits best.
brianolson/ballotstudio@39661f3

[brianolson]

this works in a development tool imdev as of 7fd88785d94409dd83840a5072de312f298a9d2a