12 ms·

What I don't get: vote counting is an easy to distribute problem, if done completely manually. Why take all this effort, cost and risk with the automation if it

by pintxo 6y ago

What I don't get: vote counting is an easy to distribute problem, if done completely manually. Why take all this effort, cost and risk with the automation if it's awfully slow in the end? Germany uses (mostly) all paper ballots which are counted in each voting location by the local election committee, which is usually chaired by a government employee, and filled up with randomly chosen citizens. First results are often available 3-4h after closing of the voting location. With final results available during the next 1-2 days. All ballots will be collected on the next org level, to be available for audits/recounts.

HideousKojima 6y ago
Easier to commit fraud or, more likely, easier to get cushy government contracts for the companies making the machines and software.
cafard 6y ago
Does Germany have as many items on a typical ballot. In Washington, DC, we had city council (by ward), city council (at large), non-voting delegate to Congress, shadow representative, shadow senator, a couple of school board slots, advisory neighborhood commissioner, and of course president. In a state you might have two state legislative seats up, plus some county offices.
- pintxo 6y ago
  This was the 2011 city council ballot for Frankfurt am Main: https://chalog.files.wordpress.com/2011/03/stimmzettel.jpg https://chalog.files.wordpress.com/2011/03/stimmzettel.jpg Every voter had 93 votes, one for each seat in the city council. It's a rather complicated system, where you can freely assign up to 3 votes of your 93 votes to each candidate, can strike candidates from the list or simply vote for party lists. Federal elections are way simpler, with just 2 votes. But often several elections are combined. But there are less elections overall in Germany, as we usually only vote for: city council, county council, state and federal parliaments, and finally EU parliament. 5 in total, most of them every 4 years, so on average 1.2 votings per year.
jcynix 6y ago
And the public is allowed to watch the counting process by the local committee in Germany. So even lay people can follow what's going on if they want.
- bleepblorp 6y ago
  This would never work in America because Republican supporters would do their absolute best to disrupt the count by intimidating poll workers. It happened in 2000[0] and it's happening again now[1]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooks_Brothers_riot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooks_Brothers_riot [1] https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/what-is-the-brooks-brothers-riot-stop-the-count-protests-draw-comparisons-to-november-2000-election-chaos/ar-BB1aHyjX https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/what-is-the-brooks-b...
  - Gwypaas 6y ago
    Sweden here, all manual on paper. A first count in 2-3 hours the night of the election, then a complete recount the following weeks in all districts, no triggers or conditions to keep it simple and use the same process for any result. You can observe the vote happening, count on election night or recount as long as you follow the instructions and don't interfere with it in any way, this includes adjacent rooms.
  - pintxo 6y ago
    In Germany, those counting the polls are often associated with the parties, so you actually often have party members (at least of the biggest parties) involved in the counting. But because any party can contribute + there is free access for observers, this is a non-problem. Actually I believe it's a feature, as it would (politically) be a lot harder to argue for the poll workers to be one-sided if your own party members are part of it.
ryanobjc 6y ago
This is what happens in many elections. The problem is mail in ballots, which were significantly more this year. When do you start processing them? In many states, the answer is: before election day. In other states, notably PA, the law says "day of election". The legislature there deliberately did not take any action to change this. Why?
- pintxo 6y ago
  Personally, mail in ballets should not be touched before the end of the election period and be counted together with the in-person votes. But given the ability to count them as they are received it should be rather easy to provide enough vote counting resources for a speedy counting on election day.
  - ryanobjc 6y ago
    Why? Why not do the pre-canvass prior to election day? What's wrong with verifying eligibility, via whatever legally mandated process, then holding the ballots. Or pre-tabulating them? The latter is what San Francisco does. The mail in ballots are verified, and put into a tabulating machine specifically for the precinct. It holds the cards securely in a locked bin, and on election night, preliminary results can be pulled off the tabulation machine and combined with the in-person votes. I am an elections clerk in San Francisco, and familiar with the processes. I say this is secure, and easy to verify and re-verify and saves a ton of effort on election day. Where is your evidence that what you suggest is more secure, or important for... some reason? I don't think you realize that during election day, the ballot cards are 'counted' (tabulated) during the day, all day. The scanning machine on site is tabulating the cards, then at the end of the day it's a simple matter of pulling the final tally after the last vote, both via paper print out and electronic media (CF cards). There is no "end of day counting" - just closing procedures, and clean up.
- InitialLastName 6y ago
  Cynically, PA's (Republican-controlled) legislature have a vested interest in doing everything they can to make vote-by-mail as arduous and sketchy as possible. Disenfranchising voters in Philadelphia and its suburbs is the only way they stay in control of the state. We're literally seeing a race right now between the vote counters trying to finish the count and the leader of the Republican party suing to stop the count and invalidate as many mail-in votes as he can (because he knows they are likely to be overwhelmingly for his opponent).
Darmody 6y ago
Spain does this and they know the results the same night. I don't understand how the US manages the election like a 3rd world country.
- bleepblorp 6y ago
  Much of American physical and civic infrastructure is like that of a 3rd world country. Most of the cases of extremely disrupted voting (such as 12 hour lines, mysteriously 'broken' voting machines in urban areas, or the 300,000 mail-in ballots that the postal system refused to deliver) are, however, intentional policies intended to reduce the turnout of Democratic voters. The US has a very long history of making it as hard as possible for non-conservatives to vote[0]; these irregularities are just the modern descendants of poll taxes and the Jim Crow laws. Politically, the US has much more in common with Central/South America, and contemporary Poland under Law and Justice, than it does with places like Spain or Germany. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_suppression_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_suppression_in_the_Unite...
  - 9HZZRfNlpR 6y ago
    Both of the countries would laugh at the idea of voting without id, and getting id costs in Europe too and takes done time to get it done. I truly believe most of the Europeans would side with Republicans if they heard all the facts.
    - Darmody 6y ago
      Yes. When I talked about this topic with some left leaning friends they were surprised that the requirement of an ID was taken as voter suppression in the US.
      - bleepblorp 6y ago
        The issue US left-leaning people have with voter ID laws is threefold: there's no documented problem with voter fraud that needs to be fixed through ID requirements, two, ID requirements are often imposed with the explicit intention of reducing voter turnout among the poor, and three, that there is allegedly a large swath of Americans who don't have valid identification and can't get it easily. Realize that in some states, the offices which produce identity documents for people who don't drive might only be open twelve days a year and are located in areas that are not accessible by public transit. For people at the bottom of the American income inequality pyramid, getting documentation might be something they can't afford, in terms of the time off work, taxi fares, and the costs of possible legal assistance. Seems to me the good faith solution is just to make sure everyone can get identification easily. However, the foundational issue is that voter ID requirements, combined with hard-to-get documentation, is a bad faith policy intended to keep poorer people from voting. Fix the 'bad faith' problem and everything else is trivial to put into place.
jcrawfordor 6y ago
I think that the cost of hiring and training election workers is a major issue. I'm not sure how European countries handle this, but in my jurisdiction election workers are hired as temps, paid hourly, and receive a several hour training. Managing this is a formidable task for the fairly small election bureau, which has a limited budget because, well, elections only happen so often. Just the staff that processes absentee ballots (on normal years, even more so this year) is a large group of people who operate 24/7 in a large warehouse. We're fortunate that the county has the resources to dedicate a large building to the election bureau, in other counties they have to borrow space in community centers or courthouses for counting and it's more of a logistical challenge to get equipment in/out. Yes, many of these same challenges exist and are managed for the physical polling locations, but hand-counting would be piling a lot more workforce and space to manage (I would guess about double) on a county that is already struggling to afford the operation. The use of precinct tabulators keeps the polling-place staff fairly small while meaning that the ballots are already tabulated when they are delivered to the election bureau. I have been involved in hand-counting ballots and it is remarkable 1) how tedious and time consuming it is, and 2) how error-prone the process is. With our typical ballots (18" long paper with three columns of questions on both sides, typical Dominion design), it takes a while for each ballot and it's a two-person process for accuracy. Even then the election administration feels that the error rate is unacceptable and so takes every measure possible to avoid ballots that must be hand-tallied. Much of this is a result of election code requirements for accuracy that involve typically three-person (and two-party) sign-off on every tally operation. Security restrictions on access to the computer totaling system adds further complexity and has lead the county to abandon "distributed" hand-tally operations, with all handling now being done centrally in the warehouse. My gut feeling is that countries which hand-count ballots probably have a lower emphasis on absolute accuracy than US election administrators typically do. I have no idea but would also be interested in knowing how common it is for election workers to be paid in Europe vs in the US. My gut feeling, though, is that hand-tallying is not practical in the US without a significant expansion of the budget for election administrators. I'm also unconvinced that hand-tallying has any meaningful advantages over precinct tabulation, since both allow for post-tally audit and in this jurisdiction and many others, hand-tally audit of a sample of machine tabulation is a standard part of post-election canvassing. As an addendum on something somewhat poorly understood, in most US jurisdictions the long delay between "unofficial" and "official" election results is a result of the canvassing process, which is a combination of hand-processing "difficult" ballots like provisional and mismarked ballots, and a standardized post-election audit which may include hand-tallying a sample of the machine-tabulated ballots (I would like this to be a mandatory practice nationally). Much of this wait is not because the machine tabulation is slow, but because the machine tabulation is not completely trusted and there is an auditing process that takes some time, plus there being ballots which are inherently not suited for machine tabulation. In my area the unofficial tabulation is usually completed overnight after election day, but the canvassing process takes substantially longer because, among other things, every provisional ballot must be manually researched by a more highly trained records team, which is a measure to avoid denying anyone the right to vote because of procedural problems with looking them up in the pollbook. Finally, as discussed, not all states allow absentee/mail ballots to be processed before polls close. There's a tradeoff here and I don't think this rule is entirely unreasonable, but it does obviously add to the delay.
pc86 6y ago
It's not properly distributed. I mean, look at Philadelphia right now. There's a convention center where they're counting hundreds of thousands of ballots. That's not only insane but idiotic. There are 66 wards in the city[0], those are further divided into a total of 1,703 voting districts. The city population is around 1.5 million - that's less than 940 ballots per district, which you can count in a day. There's no reason the same people watching the polls couldn't have been counting the mail in ballots on Wednesday and Thursday. The fact that everybody is cheering Philadelphia for only taking 4 days to count a couple hundred thousand ballots is just silly. [0] https://files7.philadelphiavotes.com/maps/ward-maps/Wards_Streets.pdf#_ga=2.163338428.101029362.1604684944-514526226.1604684944 https://files7.philadelphiavotes.com/maps/ward-maps/Wards_St...

by pintxo 6y ago

HideousKojima 6y ago

Easier to commit fraud or, more likely, easier to get cushy government contracts for the companies making the machines and software.

cafard 6y ago

Does Germany have as many items on a typical ballot. In Washington, DC, we had city council (by ward), city council (at large), non-voting delegate to Congress, shadow representative, shadow senator, a couple of school board slots, advisory neighborhood commissioner, and of course president. In a state you might have two state legislative seats up, plus some county offices.

pintxo 6y ago
This was the 2011 city council ballot for Frankfurt am Main: https://chalog.files.wordpress.com/2011/03/stimmzettel.jpg https://chalog.files.wordpress.com/2011/03/stimmzettel.jpg Every voter had 93 votes, one for each seat in the city council. It's a rather complicated system, where you can freely assign up to 3 votes of your 93 votes to each candidate, can strike candidates from the list or simply vote for party lists. Federal elections are way simpler, with just 2 votes. But often several elections are combined. But there are less elections overall in Germany, as we usually only vote for: city council, county council, state and federal parliaments, and finally EU parliament. 5 in total, most of them every 4 years, so on average 1.2 votings per year.

jcynix 6y ago

And the public is allowed to watch the counting process by the local committee in Germany. So even lay people can follow what's going on if they want.

bleepblorp 6y ago
This would never work in America because Republican supporters would do their absolute best to disrupt the count by intimidating poll workers. It happened in 2000[0] and it's happening again now[1]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooks_Brothers_riot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooks_Brothers_riot [1] https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/what-is-the-brooks-brothers-riot-stop-the-count-protests-draw-comparisons-to-november-2000-election-chaos/ar-BB1aHyjX https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/what-is-the-brooks-b...
- Gwypaas 6y ago
  Sweden here, all manual on paper. A first count in 2-3 hours the night of the election, then a complete recount the following weeks in all districts, no triggers or conditions to keep it simple and use the same process for any result. You can observe the vote happening, count on election night or recount as long as you follow the instructions and don't interfere with it in any way, this includes adjacent rooms.
- pintxo 6y ago
  In Germany, those counting the polls are often associated with the parties, so you actually often have party members (at least of the biggest parties) involved in the counting. But because any party can contribute + there is free access for observers, this is a non-problem. Actually I believe it's a feature, as it would (politically) be a lot harder to argue for the poll workers to be one-sided if your own party members are part of it.

ryanobjc 6y ago

This is what happens in many elections. The problem is mail in ballots, which were significantly more this year. When do you start processing them? In many states, the answer is: before election day. In other states, notably PA, the law says "day of election". The legislature there deliberately did not take any action to change this. Why?

pintxo 6y ago
Personally, mail in ballets should not be touched before the end of the election period and be counted together with the in-person votes. But given the ability to count them as they are received it should be rather easy to provide enough vote counting resources for a speedy counting on election day.
- ryanobjc 6y ago
  Why? Why not do the pre-canvass prior to election day? What's wrong with verifying eligibility, via whatever legally mandated process, then holding the ballots. Or pre-tabulating them? The latter is what San Francisco does. The mail in ballots are verified, and put into a tabulating machine specifically for the precinct. It holds the cards securely in a locked bin, and on election night, preliminary results can be pulled off the tabulation machine and combined with the in-person votes. I am an elections clerk in San Francisco, and familiar with the processes. I say this is secure, and easy to verify and re-verify and saves a ton of effort on election day. Where is your evidence that what you suggest is more secure, or important for... some reason? I don't think you realize that during election day, the ballot cards are 'counted' (tabulated) during the day, all day. The scanning machine on site is tabulating the cards, then at the end of the day it's a simple matter of pulling the final tally after the last vote, both via paper print out and electronic media (CF cards). There is no "end of day counting" - just closing procedures, and clean up.
InitialLastName 6y ago
Cynically, PA's (Republican-controlled) legislature have a vested interest in doing everything they can to make vote-by-mail as arduous and sketchy as possible. Disenfranchising voters in Philadelphia and its suburbs is the only way they stay in control of the state. We're literally seeing a race right now between the vote counters trying to finish the count and the leader of the Republican party suing to stop the count and invalidate as many mail-in votes as he can (because he knows they are likely to be overwhelmingly for his opponent).

Darmody 6y ago

Spain does this and they know the results the same night. I don't understand how the US manages the election like a 3rd world country.

bleepblorp 6y ago
Much of American physical and civic infrastructure is like that of a 3rd world country. Most of the cases of extremely disrupted voting (such as 12 hour lines, mysteriously 'broken' voting machines in urban areas, or the 300,000 mail-in ballots that the postal system refused to deliver) are, however, intentional policies intended to reduce the turnout of Democratic voters. The US has a very long history of making it as hard as possible for non-conservatives to vote[0]; these irregularities are just the modern descendants of poll taxes and the Jim Crow laws. Politically, the US has much more in common with Central/South America, and contemporary Poland under Law and Justice, than it does with places like Spain or Germany. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_suppression_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_suppression_in_the_Unite...
- 9HZZRfNlpR 6y ago
  Both of the countries would laugh at the idea of voting without id, and getting id costs in Europe too and takes done time to get it done. I truly believe most of the Europeans would side with Republicans if they heard all the facts.
  - Darmody 6y ago
    Yes. When I talked about this topic with some left leaning friends they were surprised that the requirement of an ID was taken as voter suppression in the US.
    - bleepblorp 6y ago
      The issue US left-leaning people have with voter ID laws is threefold: there's no documented problem with voter fraud that needs to be fixed through ID requirements, two, ID requirements are often imposed with the explicit intention of reducing voter turnout among the poor, and three, that there is allegedly a large swath of Americans who don't have valid identification and can't get it easily. Realize that in some states, the offices which produce identity documents for people who don't drive might only be open twelve days a year and are located in areas that are not accessible by public transit. For people at the bottom of the American income inequality pyramid, getting documentation might be something they can't afford, in terms of the time off work, taxi fares, and the costs of possible legal assistance. Seems to me the good faith solution is just to make sure everyone can get identification easily. However, the foundational issue is that voter ID requirements, combined with hard-to-get documentation, is a bad faith policy intended to keep poorer people from voting. Fix the 'bad faith' problem and everything else is trivial to put into place.

jcrawfordor 6y ago

I think that the cost of hiring and training election workers is a major issue. I'm not sure how European countries handle this, but in my jurisdiction election workers are hired as temps, paid hourly, and receive a several hour training. Managing this is a formidable task for the fairly small election bureau, which has a limited budget because, well, elections only happen so often. Just the staff that processes absentee ballots (on normal years, even more so this year) is a large group of people who operate 24/7 in a large warehouse. We're fortunate that the county has the resources to dedicate a large building to the election bureau, in other counties they have to borrow space in community centers or courthouses for counting and it's more of a logistical challenge to get equipment in/out. Yes, many of these same challenges exist and are managed for the physical polling locations, but hand-counting would be piling a lot more workforce and space to manage (I would guess about double) on a county that is already struggling to afford the operation. The use of precinct tabulators keeps the polling-place staff fairly small while meaning that the ballots are already tabulated when they are delivered to the election bureau. I have been involved in hand-counting ballots and it is remarkable 1) how tedious and time consuming it is, and 2) how error-prone the process is. With our typical ballots (18" long paper with three columns of questions on both sides, typical Dominion design), it takes a while for each ballot and it's a two-person process for accuracy. Even then the election administration feels that the error rate is unacceptable and so takes every measure possible to avoid ballots that must be hand-tallied. Much of this is a result of election code requirements for accuracy that involve typically three-person (and two-party) sign-off on every tally operation. Security restrictions on access to the computer totaling system adds further complexity and has lead the county to abandon "distributed" hand-tally operations, with all handling now being done centrally in the warehouse. My gut feeling is that countries which hand-count ballots probably have a lower emphasis on absolute accuracy than US election administrators typically do. I have no idea but would also be interested in knowing how common it is for election workers to be paid in Europe vs in the US. My gut feeling, though, is that hand-tallying is not practical in the US without a significant expansion of the budget for election administrators. I'm also unconvinced that hand-tallying has any meaningful advantages over precinct tabulation, since both allow for post-tally audit and in this jurisdiction and many others, hand-tally audit of a sample of machine tabulation is a standard part of post-election canvassing. As an addendum on something somewhat poorly understood, in most US jurisdictions the long delay between "unofficial" and "official" election results is a result of the canvassing process, which is a combination of hand-processing "difficult" ballots like provisional and mismarked ballots, and a standardized post-election audit which may include hand-tallying a sample of the machine-tabulated ballots (I would like this to be a mandatory practice nationally). Much of this wait is not because the machine tabulation is slow, but because the machine tabulation is not completely trusted and there is an auditing process that takes some time, plus there being ballots which are inherently not suited for machine tabulation. In my area the unofficial tabulation is usually completed overnight after election day, but the canvassing process takes substantially longer because, among other things, every provisional ballot must be manually researched by a more highly trained records team, which is a measure to avoid denying anyone the right to vote because of procedural problems with looking them up in the pollbook. Finally, as discussed, not all states allow absentee/mail ballots to be processed before polls close. There's a tradeoff here and I don't think this rule is entirely unreasonable, but it does obviously add to the delay.

pc86 6y ago

It's not properly distributed. I mean, look at Philadelphia right now. There's a convention center where they're counting hundreds of thousands of ballots. That's not only insane but idiotic. There are 66 wards in the city[0], those are further divided into a total of 1,703 voting districts. The city population is around 1.5 million - that's less than 940 ballots per district, which you can count in a day. There's no reason the same people watching the polls couldn't have been counting the mail in ballots on Wednesday and Thursday. The fact that everybody is cheering Philadelphia for only taking 4 days to count a couple hundred thousand ballots is just silly. [0] https://files7.philadelphiavotes.com/maps/ward-maps/Wards_Streets.pdf#_ga=2.163338428.101029362.1604684944-514526226.1604684944 https://files7.philadelphiavotes.com/maps/ward-maps/Wards_St...