Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Miscellaneous/2019 September 8

= September 8 =

Doubt II
See above. Sorry if I go back there; is there no one able to help me, to give me a confirmation? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 93.41.100.198 (talk) 17:02, 8 September 2019 (UTC)
 * Some of us skip over a wall-of-text. You'd probably have better luck if you concisely state your actual question.  2606:A000:1126:28D:DC71:B9D2:DF2E:68A6 (talk) 17:32, 8 September 2019 (UTC)


 * Yes, I certainly do. The longer and more meandering the question, the more work it will take me to figure out what is actually being asked and the more likely I am to get it wrong. At some point, it's not worth the effort. Ideally, the Q should be short enough to fit in the title, with details listed in the body. SinisterLefty (talk) 17:53, 8 September 2019 (UTC)
 * Even without the excessive pasting from a newspaper the OP's actual question "may be that how they adopted punch cards?" challenges comprehension. DroneB (talk) 11:32, 9 September 2019 (UTC)

Request (abbreviated and correct doubt)
I quote an excerpt from an article in a New York newspaper one day before the 1988 US presidential election.

"Officials at RF Shoup, however, seeking to prove that Cronus is a monopoly, charge that Cronus systems will count fifty million votes on November 8th. In any case, Cronus and CES systems are used by the voters in such cities as Los Angeles, Chicago, Detroit, Houston, Phoenix, Miami, Seattle, Minneapolis, Cincinnati, and Cleveland. " https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1988/11/07/counting-votes

I understand that these cities, in that year, adopted punch cards as a voting system. I need this confirmation to see if I understand correctly. Nothing more. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 93.41.100.198 (talk) 17:50, 8 September 2019 (UTC)


 * We're getting closer to a question now. Are you asking if the article you linked to claims that those cities changed to a punch card voting system in 1988, or are you asking if that claim is true ? SinisterLefty (talk) 17:57, 8 September 2019 (UTC)

Those cities probably had punch cards as voting systems. The CES if I'm not mistaken was the ancestor of the Votomatic so I think it is so. But there is a problem if next to the word CES you put the word Cronus I go into confusion because I don't know what this term means. However I did some research encouraged by this silly "conflict". LA, Chicago, Seattle, etc. they had those systems so having done some sort of verification, let's say I would have solved it. If only you knew what this "Cronus" was ... I wasn't lucky in the research: probably a company that bought the CES system, boh ... — Preceding unsigned comment added by 93.41.100.198 (talk) 18:29, 8 September 2019 (UTC)


 * I see. So your question is "What is Cronus, as described in the linked story ?" Correct ?


 * The article says "Cronus Industries, of Dallas, is better known as its sole and wholly owned subsidiary, the Business Records Corporation (B.R.C.)." So, searching for them I found this: https://www.manta.com/c/mbd0t72/business-records-corporation. They make around a million dollars per employee, not bad. With such a small staff (5-9) they couldn't build the machines themselves, they must farm that work out. But they could design the machines with that staff. SinisterLefty (talk) 18:53, 8 September 2019 (UTC)

Probably? In Election Systems & Software, it is stated that Computer Election Systems Incorporated (CESI) developed punch-card voting machines, and was sold to Cronus/BRC in 1985. Meaning that Cronus could have been the company selling punch card machines to the stated cities. Someguy1221 (talk) 09:16, 9 September 2019 (UTC)