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Why can’t we just count votes by hand? To me this is over optimization and really just helps a special interest group who wants to sell apps and voting machines
by ericmay 7y ago
Why can’t we just count votes by hand? To me this is over optimization and really just helps a special interest group who wants to sell apps and voting machines. It’s not like we pay a lot of money for election volunteers.
- Juliate 7y agoThis. Automation and digitalization of the voting process bring little advantage (speed) to a process where publicity, transparency, accountability need to happen slowly and to consolidate slowly, for the partial & full results to be trusted.
- moomin 7y agoThe UK, and in particular the north east are well worth looking into here. All paper ballots, no counting machinery, 30,000 voters (smaller than Iowa but of a similar order of magnitude), voting from across the constituency (no cramming into halls), pretty much zero fraud. Accurate results within two hours of the polls closing. The ballots are also kept and can be verified by the voters after the fact. No state in America has any excuse for running an election less effectively than Sunderland.
- 7777fps 7y agoTo elaborate on this, the entire country does this on the same day to vote in our general elections and it scales to 70m+ people without any issue. The reference to the North East and Sunderland is that they are usually the first to declare around 2 hours after the polls have closed. Most other constituencies take between 7 and 12 hours to count votes through the night.
- andygates 7y agoThe UK has very simple ballots, though: one bit of paper, one pile to count. America has a whole raft of issues voted at the same time, which complicates counting sufficiently that machines are more attractive.
- thomk 7y agoSorry could you expand on that a bit more? You only vote on one thing at a time?
- moomin 7y agoTypically you’ll only be dealing with elections: General Election, Local Election, Mayoral Election, Regional Parliament Election, (until recently) European Parliament election. Each of these is a different piece of paper, but on any given Election Day it’s rare (but not unheard of) to see three at once.
- Tyrek 7y agoUK is under a parliamentary system; effectively, the only vote is to select your local representative. Everything else (who wins the Government, what issues get passed, etc.) is derived from this single point.
- thomk 7y agoSo you do not personally vote on (as an example) how much money goes to schools? Your representative does that voting for you. Is that correct?
- pabl0rg 7y agoApps could be a valuable tool if we were willing to really change how we vote: put candidates in order of preference. Doing that on paper is not intuitive. The problem is, established politicians and politicos know and prefer the complex game that they know: one vote + electoral college.
- madeofpalk 7y agoIt's not? Putting numbers 1-5 in boxes isn't intuitive?
- thomk 7y agoNo, unfortunately not. You will get people who will put all 1s or a 6 here and there.
- hadrien01 7y agoRanked choice voting is already used by multiple countries with no problem
- madeofpalk 7y agoAustralia manages to do it... Hell, not saying its great, but in the last election you could vote 1-6 "above the line", or IIRC 1-105 below the line https://www.aec.gov.au/Voting/How_to_vote/practice/practice-senate.htm https://www.aec.gov.au/Voting/How_to_vote/practice/practice-...
- ben_w 7y agoYou’d be surprised. The UK had a referendum on this in 2011, where the scheme was rejected without controversy, and the “no” argument I remember from the time was that this is too complicated: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_United_Kingdom_Alternative_Vote_referendum https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_United_Kingdom_Alternat... And yes, I am aware this system is already used in many places.
- Juliate 7y agoThe issue is that, if one cannot reasonably trust a voting process, the vote is null in effect. Humans cannot trust what they cannot understand and cannot verify. A paper-based voting procedure, and counting procedure provide these guarantees: understanding and verification, through real-time, peer-based counting & review. Any other automatic system cannot bring, at this point, the same guarantees, where you have to trust: 1) the people/system that built the system, 2) the process they used that ensures against any wrong-doing. It is low-tech. And that's a good thing. No high-tech alternative provides the same value & the same guarantees at the same time.
- logifail 7y ago> Why can’t we just count votes by hand? It works well, is hard to cheat, and there's no money in it?
- thomk 7y agoIt seems like it would be much, much easier to cheat, no? Yes a few people have to be in on it, but if the history of American politics has shown us anything; that's doable.
- moomin 7y agoIt's actually really hard, because the ballots are kept and can be verified by the voters. Keeping a full paper trail is a great protection against fraud.
- mstade 7y agoNot to mention the sheer amount of people you have to convince if you want to have any meaningful impact. And not just to cheat, but also keep quiet about it lest you get caught. What's that old Ben Franklin quote, three people can keep a secret but only if two of them are dead?
- vidanay 7y agoIt's also really easy to verify in parallel. Two or three separate reporters per jurisdiction phone in to physically separate tabulating centers, tabulating centers cross-check and verify at the end.
- mhh__ 7y agoIt's worked in the UK for centuries
- A4ET8a8uTh0 7y agoI think you nailed it. The only real argument against it is that you have to pay people to pay by hand, but I sincerely doubt that amount of manual labor costs more than an app.
- thomk 7y agoActually, this sound like a perfect job for open source to me.
- gbear605 7y agoOpen source would be better than proprietary, but the best code ever written is the code never written.
- thomk 7y agoI agree with that to a degree. The problem is we are trading off technical problems for corruption. For counting things, it seems like computers would be a good fit.
- rwbhn 7y agoLots of good posts out there about why electronic voting (w/out a paper trail) is a bad idea. Here's one: https://www.markpack.org.uk/160622/why-electronic-voting-is-still-a-bad-idea-tom-scott/ https://www.markpack.org.uk/160622/why-electronic-voting-is-...
- simion314 7y ago>For counting things, it seems like computers would be a good fit. You could keep the computers but you also have the papers sealed in boxes. Then you can manually check 1-5% of the votes and make sure the machines are correct. Or if someone contests the count and a judge decides the reasons are fair you can count again all the votes in that polling station.
- thomk 7y agoI like that, agreed.
- ken 7y agoFor counting pieces of paper, machines sound like a good fit. Any capabilities beyond the literal needs (i.e., counting) sound like an invitation for mistakes and corruption. Your phone has 100,000 times as much memory as the Apollo Guidance Computer, but nobody would ever use a smartphone for actual spacecraft guidance. UNIVAC famously analyzed the 1952 presidential election. Today we've got about twice as many voters, so maybe get a computer twice as powerful as a UNIVAC.
- shinryuu 7y agoSweden is one of the most digitalized countries in the world, yet we count votes by hand. Do like Sweden, count votes by hand :)
- nabla9 7y agoBruce Schneier thinks that the best compromise is to to have paper ballots that can be counted by a machine or by hand. If all observers agree the vote was right, machine count stands. If someone challenges the vote, you count by hand.
- Operyl 7y agoExactly. I think that machines can be used just fine in a very specific configuration. I.e. you go to a machine, select the choices you want, that machine prints out a ballot with your choices. You review that ballot. If the ballot is correct, you go over to a tabulation machine, feed it in, and call it a day. That machine retains the paper ballots if verification is needed. EDIT: And if someone wants to fill out a paper ballot manually, let them. Just have a few spares around, most people won't.
- badwolf 7y agoThis is how the new voting machines we use here in Austin work. Big friendly, easy to use touch screen, it then prints your ballot on paper, in big friendly easy to read lettering. You then feed that into another machine. There's the e-voting, as well as paper ballot paper trail.
- hoseja 7y agoWHY does anyone need electronic voting in the first place? How much of an inconvenience is it to make a mark next to your choice on a piece of paper? I feel like there is some insane American reason to make voting machines but I can't comprehend it.
- Operyl 7y agoIn Florida, our ballets are very long legal pieces of paper and can sometimes be 7-8 pages worth... So I definitely see the appeal here. The font is tiny for the population, as well. A lot of our population has problems filling the bubbles too (because of varying physical conditions).
- umanwizard 7y agoYou answered your own question.
- dragonwriter 7y ago> Why can’t we just count votes by hand? “Tabulate” here isn't a synonym for “count”, its recording/aggregating/communicating counts made outside the system.
- vidanay 7y agoThere are 1681 reporting precincts in Iowa. I think those could be tabulated on 4-5 sheets of graph paper with a #2 pencil if needed.
- dragonwriter 7y agoThey have to report first alignment, second alignment, and state delegate equivalent counts for each precinct; assuming you only need columns for 20 candidates for the first alignment and half of that for the second alignment and SDE count, and using optimal alignment and assuming each figure needs no more than one square and standard 8½”×11” sheets of 1/4” graph paper, you'd need about 22 pages for the first alignment and 11 each for the second alignment and SDE count to record the raw precinct numbers, so you're off by about an order of magnitude. And, of course, graph paper doesn't address the need to rapidly aggregate the numbers, either physically (in space) or analytically (to get totals). Or to reconcile them for inconsistencies between the three dimensions. (Which is the whole point of the new reporting requirements imposed on the IDP, and, according to the IDP, the actual source of delays.) And, of course, using #2 pencil for the records has its own problems as far as security goes.
- krn 7y ago> Why can’t we just count votes by hand? That's how the president, the parlament, and the local governments are elected in Lithuania, a country of the size of Iowa. It takes 10 minutes to set up a new private limited company online, but all votes in the elections are still counted by hand.
- rtkwe 7y agoThere's a hand paper trail too of voter preference cards from each round that we can go check. The app is there to speed reporting so that the info about the winners can get out there faster.
- snowwrestler 7y agoThey did count votes by hand (there's no other choice in a caucus). This app was simply to aggregate the results more quickly than hundreds of phone calls. It was just a cheap app that was inadequately tested. It's a bummer but hardly a crisis for democracy, and not really relevant to discussions of technology for vote counting in primaries or general elections.