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Canadian here. We still count ballots the old fashioned way and get our election results out the night of the election (typically). Presumably that scales linea
by garyrichardson 6y ago
Canadian here. We still count ballots the old fashioned way and get our election results out the night of the election (typically). Presumably that scales linearly.. more voters means more ballot boxes and more officials counting and auditing. This seems like a solved problem to me.
Why doesn't/wouldn't this work in the US? My guess is the complexity of your ballots -- we typically vote for one person and every couple of years there might be a referendum question.
- magicsmoke 6y agoThat and having Elections Canada run everything instead of each province rolling their own protocols.
- ttul 6y agoImagine that: a non-partisan agency, much as the police and fire services are also non-partisan.
- jimmygrapes 6y agoIt's always non-partisan until it becomes partisan somewhere along the line
- snypher 6y agoThe police are not non-partisan, at least in USA.
- koheripbal 6y agoIt's hard to imagine any worker staying non-partisan when one party is threatening their paycheck.
- jcranmer 6y agoOne of the main reasons it is taking so long is the volume of mail-in ballots is extremely high compared to prior elections. And on top of that, in several states, Republicans were adamant that vote tabulation not begin early to deal with this volume, with the entirely foreseeable result that counting took far longer than necessary.
- garyrichardson 6y agoRight. That's this year. What about the last 20 years of US elections?
- Armisael16 6y agoWhat about them? Presumably you’re thinking of Florida in 2000, where the margin of victory was 0.0092%, and thus exceptional care in counting was merited. As far as I can recall other national elections have been timely in the last 20 years.
- jcranmer 6y agoIn most elections, the election results are clear by the time I go to bed normally.
- handmodel 6y agoI'd also like a citation on the Canadian counting. There last election wasn't particularly close and from my understanding the mathematics of someone other than Trudeau + Liberal party winning were pretty much set.
- chrisco255 6y agoRepublicans wanted ballots to be tabulated up front. This is completely false. The debacle of overnight ballots showing up at the 11th hour past the closing of the polls is another reason to tabulate them as they come in.
- CountSessine 6y agoBut it still doesn’t answer the question - in Canada we count all the ballots the same day BY HAND. Why is this so hard in the US? The only thing that I can think of is that your elections staff are grossly under-allocated?
- dole 6y ago17 million votes don’t take as long to count as 175 million?
- refurb 6y agoThe ballots are much simpler in Canada. I remember getting a ballot that was the size of a 4' x 6' card. Put a check next to the candidate you want as the MP in your riding. Done. The US ones can be multiple pages where you end up voting for a dozen candidates across multiple federal, state and local offices, plus a number of ballot initiatives. It's kind of nuts. But I agree the old fashion paper and pen is the best system. It doesn't matter how theoretically secure some high-tech digital voting system is - unless every voter can understand how it works you'll always have people who think it's fixed. Actually, even with paper and pen people will think it's fixed, but you at least eliminate a ton of the unknown because of the physical record.
- bobthepanda 6y agoI mean, Canadians also have local and provincial elections and referenda, no?
- garyrichardson 6y agoYup. But local, provincial and national elections are different events. Referendums are occasionally attached. Ballots are almost always one question for provincial and national.
- ttul 6y agoAnd regardless, all elections are run by a non-partisan agency. Just like the health service, the police service, the fire service, and the garbage service.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- CountSessine 6y agoI really don’t think that that’s going to be the savings you think it is. Counting votes isn’t front-loaded with a flat rate cost or subject to duplication of effort. Having a single federal elections agency isn’t going to help if you have a super complicated ballot.
- ARandomerDude 6y agoYour population is also less than that of California alone.
- CountSessine 6y agoYes, and of course this should be irrelevant given that as the poster said, presumably these things scale linearly.