10 ms·
Indonesia election: More than 270 election staff die counting votes
- anilakar 8y agoHow long until a techno-libertarian suggests that electronic or even online voting would have saved those 270 lives?
- zhoujianfu 8y agoI’ll suggest it! So... about 1 hour?
- spraak 8y agoWould electronic or online voting NOT have saved the lives? Or what is your point?
- chowells 8y agoOf course it wouldn't have. None of them died from counting votes.
- spraak 8y agoAha, what are you suggesting that they died from? I'm sincerely curious and not sure what you mean
- yorwba 8y agoNatural causes. If they hadn't been counting votes, they'd have died doing something else. The number of people involved was high enough for a few hundred deaths to be expected: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19773386 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19773386
- SmellyGeekBoy 8y agoAutomation has saved a lot of lives in other areas so it would make sense that this would also be the case in this instance. Whether removing the human factor from the democratic process is a good idea is a different debate entirely. I don't consider myself a "techno-libertarian", whatever that means.
- hn_throwaway_99 8y agoSo my first reaction was "Jesus, that's like the equivalent of the Sri Lanka bombings!" But then I read the article, and it said there were 7 million people counting votes. If those deaths were over the period of about 10 days since the election, that works out to an annualized death rate of about 0.14%. I don't know what a "baseline" death rate would be for this population, but it at least adds some context.
- rando444 8y agoI don't get the feeling there were 7 million people counting ballots.. at least not under equal conditions. If everyone in the country submitted a ballot that would be less than 30 per person to check. This doesn't seem to match the terrible conditions described in the article.
- joe_the_user 8y agoThere were 800K polling places, maybe 9 workers per polling place. Most of those would do little during the day. If you transported the ballots to central location, you could wind-up with a smaller number of counters working through the night. So basically, if tasks were divided poorly beforehand something seemingly ridiculously easy on paper could wind-up a complete disaster for a few, at scale.
- JshWright 8y agoTransporting the ballots to a central location would increase the number of miles driven while doing election related work. That would likely increase the death rate...
- codedokode 8y ago800K polling places is a lot. In huge Russia, we have only about 90 000 of them. Indonesia has twice the population, but it is still a lot.
- dragonwriter 8y ago
- red-indian 8y ago> More than 270 election workers in Indonesia have died, mostly of fatigue-related illnesses caused by long hours of work Was that really the cause of death? Or is it just what they are saying. That seems to be an absolutely enormous number of fatigue deaths from one election.
- crakenzak 8y agoThis exactly, how does someone die of fatigue?
- the_jends 8y agoBy working continuously for more than 24 hours. I'm Indonesian and there are stories of polling places running from 7am to 9am the next day, not counting the hours they spent setting up the polls. The main reason it became so grueling is that we held simultaneous elections for president, congress, and provincial representatives this year. We learned our lesson and won't be doing them simultaneously next time around.
- rtkwe 8y agoWork long hours in an unairconditioned space with already compromised health.
- charliebrownau 8y agoI am surprised ISLAM hasn't taken over Indonesia and Philippines yet
- haditab 8y ago> Indonesia's election commission plans to compensate surviving families 36 million rupiah (£1,930; $2,500) for every deceased worker - roughly equivalent to one year's pay at minimum wage, according to the Nikkei Asian Review. I know there is no price for human life but this seems rediculously low to me. According to [0] this is equivalent to 10 month rent in the city for a one bedroom apartment. Definitely not enough to offset the cost of the loss of a working family member for a enough time to be able to make changes. [0] https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/country_result.jsp?country=Indonesia&displayCurrency=USD https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/country_result.jsp?cou...
- caprese 8y ago> I know there is no price for human life Narrator: there is
- IshKebab 8y agoAbsolutely. £20-30k per year. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-28983924 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-28983924 When I did my engineering degree I believe they said they'll spend up to £1m/life saved on safety for the rail network. I think the threshold was lower for roads.
- caprese 8y agoCoL adjustment downward by 90% in Indonesia
- yorwba 8y agoThe kind of people who use Numbeo are at least somewhat wealthy compared to most of the world population (since they have the means to afford travel) and therefore the prices skew upwards. The average local probably spends closer to the lower bound given by Numbeo or even below it.
- argd678 8y agoThose numbers look high to me, an inexpensive meal you can do for $0.50, and the average salary is definitely less than $350, that’s an entry level software engineer in many cities outside of Jakarta. Plenty of people get by on $200 or less.
- littlestymaar 8y agoI'm surprised to see that they pay workers to count ballots. In France ballots are counted by benevolent citizens at voting places, and I always assumed it was a necessary condition for free democratic elections. What about your country fellow HNer, how do elections work there ?
- b_tterc_p 8y agoThat implies the most politically passionate people are going to be counting votes? Isn’t that a bad idea?
- jonathanyc 8y agoYeah, that’s a horrible idea. It’s the same reason most cities elect mayors but hire city managers, and why we try to pay legislators a decent salary. Otherwise only people with nothing else to do can afford to become politicians or count votes.
- littlestymaar 8y agoI did count votes a few times in my city: it's just a matter of 1 or 2h hours of your time on a sunday evening right after the vote is closed(6->8pm). And many people of all ages participate. Here we just see it a civic duty, like voting itself…
- pmyteh 8y agoPlaces with partisan vote counting can avoid problems with this kind of thing by having partisans for multiple parties working on the same ballots, perhaps with a neutral overseer.
- askvictor 8y agoIn Australia, the votes are counted by paid volunteers, but each party has scrutineers overseeing the counting.
- erk__ 8y ago
- discaler 8y agoWow. Think they can improves the process and avoid these deaths. Compare that to India which has a much bigger scale and organizes elections in a much more organized manner without straining their workers https://pursuit.unimelb.edu.au/articles/how-india-runs-the-biggest-elections-in-the-world https://pursuit.unimelb.edu.au/articles/how-india-runs-the-b...
- apetresc 8y agoI got a totally different impression of the meaning of this story from the headline, before reading the article. It sounded ominously like maybe those 270 people had counted the ballots “the wrong way.”
- KuhlMensch 8y agoSitenote: 7 million people counting & monitoring feels off. Thats one person required for every (very roughly) ~22 ballots cast (~100% turnout, pop. of 250m, +18 voting) Especially considering the population density of the country.