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In Canada there are no voting machines for federal elections. You just get a clear ballot and a pencil. The counting is done by several people from different pa

by krrrh 10y ago

In Canada there are no voting machines for federal elections. You just get a clear ballot and a pencil. The counting is done by several people from different parties simultaneously. The drawback is that sometimes it can take hours to count the votes.

paulmd 10y ago
The best kinds of voting machines blend a paper trail and digital counting. For example there are machines that use fill-in-the-bubble ScanTron ballots like are used for multiple-choice tests, or machines that provide a digital count and a paper trail. It's still not 100% perfect. The ScanTron machines are really accurate but there is still a <1% error rate in ballots and in a really close election you will get some variation from doing it a second time. And then you get the idiots who filled in two bubbles, or connect the dot, and so on, and who knows what happens there. Hopefully just a rejected ballot but who knows. The usual recourse if a machine screws up during the test is an upset student coming to talk to the professor but you don't have any way of validating how your ballot was counted. The problem is that when you start letting humans interpret a contested election it all still goes to shit real quick. You suddenly have lawyers fighting to interpret what each individual voter meant with each individual ballot and it just takes forever. We tried that with the 2000 election and it sucked pretty hard. In the end it may be the most accurate but it literally takes months to play out even with just a disputed county or two, let alone a whole state/province. Constitutionally, we hold elections on "the first Monday after the second Tuesday of November" and the electoral college (which actually counts) votes on "the first Monday after the second Wednesday in December". No I am not making this up, they are based on arcane 18th-century logic about when farmers would be done with harvest and what day they could come into town and shit like that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Election_Day_(United_States) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Election_Day_(United_States) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_College_(United_States) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_College_(United_Stat... Anyway, the point is there's a hard constitutional date limit and the only way you go past that is the Supreme Court pulling an equal-protection ruling about how halting the recount would invalidate people's votes. Which just comes down to a party-line ruling anyway, like it did in 2000 when they halted the recount.
- cmurf 10y ago
  Or 1876, where basically one guy needed 1 electoral college vote to win, the other needed 20, and the commission formed by Congress managed to get the guy with the 2nd most popular votes the 20 electoral votes needed to win, because of a party line vote in the commission. Not that a party line vote means it's an invalid or unscrupulous election. It's quite expected the team stands together. It'd take something really extraordinary to get a defector. Anyway, the president in 1876 wasn't determined until March 1877. http://elections.harpweek.com/09Ver2Controversy/DayByDay.htm http://elections.harpweek.com/09Ver2Controversy/DayByDay.htm Edit: It's much better to fallback on a parliamentary process like this, where we can only blame ourselves for having voted in X team to be in Congress, thus making the decision should there be a contested election. When it shifts to who can convince judges to do recounts is when it becomes totally nebulous like a flip of the coin, rather than an "oh well that's unsurprising". But no doubt there would be all kinds of outcry about faithless electors should the Electoral College on Dec 19 end up picking someone other than Donald in a way that departs from the expected outcome, even though that's the actual #1 reason why Madison and Hamilton went with the Electoral College system - that voters could get it wrong. Giving less populated states effectively more than 1 vote for 1 person, was a far lesser consideration.
cmurf 10y ago
<s>Oh my god, what would the U.S. media do if it couldn't report the results of an election in minutes or hours, and it might even take days or weeks for some elections! A democracy wouldn't survive without computerized tabulation of votes, ridiculously expensive proprietary voting machines, or even electricity!</s>
- dexterdog 10y ago
  Actually the media would love the extra coverage of the extended event.

by krrrh 10y ago

paulmd 10y ago

The best kinds of voting machines blend a paper trail and digital counting. For example there are machines that use fill-in-the-bubble ScanTron ballots like are used for multiple-choice tests, or machines that provide a digital count and a paper trail. It's still not 100% perfect. The ScanTron machines are really accurate but there is still a <1% error rate in ballots and in a really close election you will get some variation from doing it a second time. And then you get the idiots who filled in two bubbles, or connect the dot, and so on, and who knows what happens there. Hopefully just a rejected ballot but who knows. The usual recourse if a machine screws up during the test is an upset student coming to talk to the professor but you don't have any way of validating how your ballot was counted. The problem is that when you start letting humans interpret a contested election it all still goes to shit real quick. You suddenly have lawyers fighting to interpret what each individual voter meant with each individual ballot and it just takes forever. We tried that with the 2000 election and it sucked pretty hard. In the end it may be the most accurate but it literally takes months to play out even with just a disputed county or two, let alone a whole state/province. Constitutionally, we hold elections on "the first Monday after the second Tuesday of November" and the electoral college (which actually counts) votes on "the first Monday after the second Wednesday in December". No I am not making this up, they are based on arcane 18th-century logic about when farmers would be done with harvest and what day they could come into town and shit like that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Election_Day_(United_States) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Election_Day_(United_States) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_College_(United_States) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_College_(United_Stat... Anyway, the point is there's a hard constitutional date limit and the only way you go past that is the Supreme Court pulling an equal-protection ruling about how halting the recount would invalidate people's votes. Which just comes down to a party-line ruling anyway, like it did in 2000 when they halted the recount.

cmurf 10y ago
Or 1876, where basically one guy needed 1 electoral college vote to win, the other needed 20, and the commission formed by Congress managed to get the guy with the 2nd most popular votes the 20 electoral votes needed to win, because of a party line vote in the commission. Not that a party line vote means it's an invalid or unscrupulous election. It's quite expected the team stands together. It'd take something really extraordinary to get a defector. Anyway, the president in 1876 wasn't determined until March 1877. http://elections.harpweek.com/09Ver2Controversy/DayByDay.htm http://elections.harpweek.com/09Ver2Controversy/DayByDay.htm Edit: It's much better to fallback on a parliamentary process like this, where we can only blame ourselves for having voted in X team to be in Congress, thus making the decision should there be a contested election. When it shifts to who can convince judges to do recounts is when it becomes totally nebulous like a flip of the coin, rather than an "oh well that's unsurprising". But no doubt there would be all kinds of outcry about faithless electors should the Electoral College on Dec 19 end up picking someone other than Donald in a way that departs from the expected outcome, even though that's the actual #1 reason why Madison and Hamilton went with the Electoral College system - that voters could get it wrong. Giving less populated states effectively more than 1 vote for 1 person, was a far lesser consideration.

cmurf 10y ago

<s>Oh my god, what would the U.S. media do if it couldn't report the results of an election in minutes or hours, and it might even take days or weeks for some elections! A democracy wouldn't survive without computerized tabulation of votes, ridiculously expensive proprietary voting machines, or even electricity!</s>

dexterdog 10y ago
Actually the media would love the extra coverage of the extended event.