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Hand counting of paper ballots is a highly parallel process that can be done quickly at any scale. The only reason to introduce counting machines is so that som
by lloda 8y ago
Hand counting of paper ballots is a highly parallel process that can be done quickly at any scale. The only reason to introduce counting machines is so that someone can extract money from it.
- RightMillennial 8y agoI mostly agree. We should be hand counting all ballots. But also incorporating a counting machine could help improve reliability similarly to a checksum. If the hard counted and machine results are not identical, then recount because there was a mistake somewhere.
- specialist 8y agoFWIW, most proponets of hand counting advocate "sort & stack". For elections in the USA, that means a count per race / issue. Some jurisdictions can have over 30 per ballot. Further, each precinct has to be tabulated separately. The poll site I ran for years had 5 precincts, roughly average. We'd have 400-800 ballots per election, depending. One change that would make manual counting more feasible would be to split our ballots into federal, state, local. Every election administrator I've ever met opposed manual counting. Mostly because it's a lot of work. A group of intended to run experiments to determine the effort, cost, accuracy of manual counts. Simulate a real election, eg print up marked ballots where the totals are predetermined but not known to the counters. Alas, we never got our act together before every one burned out. PS- Any tabulation method has to accommodate marking errors, aka adjudicating voter intent.
- dublinben 8y agoElectronic voting also makes it easier to manipulate the results of elections.