4 ms·

At some point in the process, vote information will be stored digitally. Whether it's posted to the SoE's website or during transmittal to the Federal or state

At some point in the process, vote information will be stored digitally. Whether it's posted to the SoE's website or during transmittal to the Federal or state governments. I'm also trying to imagine elections with the number of people we have and number of races being counted by hand from the beginning, with no digital storage or tabulation, and it is rife with errors and even harder to validate in a reasonable way.

Closi 6y ago
Hand counting is how we do it in the U.K. It’s not actually that hard at all, including validation, through simple physical processes (that are incredibly tried and tested!). Write the contents of the vote totals on the outside of the box containing the ballots (total must reconcile to number of ballots placed in), then total all the box totals at the end for a single constituency. Constituencies then report back. We get results back within a day and the validity has never been seriously questioned. The process can easily scale linearly too.
- godelski 6y ago
  There are scaling issues though. The US is 5x the size of the UK. Counting is actually pretty hard and I'm not convinced it scales linearly. I'm also not convinced results are actually back in a day, but rather good estimates are given within a day.
  - jen20 6y ago
    The overall counting process in the UK scales horizontally rather well (it's a great example of map-reduce!), and it's close to unthinkable that the results affected by any given count would not be known on the evening of an election day, even if the shape of the resulting government were not known as in 2010. What is not reflected however is the sheer number of votes that people tend to cast in the US - often voting on dozens of different measures. The UK process does not have this aspect - at worst there may be a Westminster, country-specific parliament and city or town council on the same election day, and they are handled via separate ballot papers.
    - godelski 6y ago
      You also have to consider that polling stations are not uniform in their ratio of people to workers/machines. Some places you can just walk right in and other places you wait all day to vote. Assuming symmetry in this aspect is ignoring the fundamental problem here. If you watched the graphs update you'd notice that the small counties typically got their results quickly but the large counties took a lot longer. There is also the gather step where you gather the county votes from the polling station. Larger cities have a more difficult gather operation that smaller areas. Again, this all can be observed if you watch the votes over time.
      - majewsky 6y ago
        I don't know what's going on in the US system, but what you describe sounds rather broken. In Germany (where I live and regularly volunteer as a polling worker), a larger county does not report slower than a smaller county. "Larger county" would just mean "more polling places" so that each polling place maps to about the same number of voters, therefore the load is distributed smoothly. The longest line I've ever seen in a polling station was 10 people who showed up in a group, and it took only 5 minutes to serve all of them.
        godelski 6y ago
        Is this true or are you just guessing? If it is true I'd like some reference to back it up because to me this doesn't even make sense logistically. Like the same effect is true in distributed computing so it would be extra weird for humans to be far superior in this manner.
  - chrisseaton 6y ago
    > There are scaling issues though. It’s literally an ‘embarrassingly parallel’ problem. A hundred people can count ten times the ballots that ten people can, and then merge their results.
    - godelski 6y ago
      This is a naive assumption. There's a few aspects that have to be considered that make it not trivially parallel. The first is that there are a lot of reduction steps where we're doing many to one communication. The more nodes you have the more communication there has to be and this is an issue. The second issue is that if we (naively) assume that there's a consistent error at each step, that the error will grow in each gather step. So if each worker has a 0.5% error rate, each gather has a 0.5% error rate, then our error rate depends on the number of workers and gather steps. For what it is worth there is at least a gather step at each poll station, then each precinct, then the state, and then the country. It is also likely that these all get worse as the election is closer and there's more pressure on.
  - rsynnott 6y ago
    EU parliamentary elections are largely on paper; the EU has 100 million people more than the US. US elections are also operated entirely regionally; the largest US election is that in California, which is smaller than the UK.
godelski 6y ago
Yeah it makes more sense to have a digital tabulation, paper receipts, and a paper count later. You can also add in independent analysis by counting random subsets to do quick verification. Digital doesn't mean getting rid of paper ballots. And people are confusing experts advice of not doing "online voting" with "digital voting".

Closi 6y ago

Hand counting is how we do it in the U.K. It’s not actually that hard at all, including validation, through simple physical processes (that are incredibly tried and tested!). Write the contents of the vote totals on the outside of the box containing the ballots (total must reconcile to number of ballots placed in), then total all the box totals at the end for a single constituency. Constituencies then report back. We get results back within a day and the validity has never been seriously questioned. The process can easily scale linearly too.

godelski 6y ago
There are scaling issues though. The US is 5x the size of the UK. Counting is actually pretty hard and I'm not convinced it scales linearly. I'm also not convinced results are actually back in a day, but rather good estimates are given within a day.
- jen20 6y ago
  The overall counting process in the UK scales horizontally rather well (it's a great example of map-reduce!), and it's close to unthinkable that the results affected by any given count would not be known on the evening of an election day, even if the shape of the resulting government were not known as in 2010. What is not reflected however is the sheer number of votes that people tend to cast in the US - often voting on dozens of different measures. The UK process does not have this aspect - at worst there may be a Westminster, country-specific parliament and city or town council on the same election day, and they are handled via separate ballot papers.
  - godelski 6y ago
    You also have to consider that polling stations are not uniform in their ratio of people to workers/machines. Some places you can just walk right in and other places you wait all day to vote. Assuming symmetry in this aspect is ignoring the fundamental problem here. If you watched the graphs update you'd notice that the small counties typically got their results quickly but the large counties took a lot longer. There is also the gather step where you gather the county votes from the polling station. Larger cities have a more difficult gather operation that smaller areas. Again, this all can be observed if you watch the votes over time.
    - majewsky 6y ago
      I don't know what's going on in the US system, but what you describe sounds rather broken. In Germany (where I live and regularly volunteer as a polling worker), a larger county does not report slower than a smaller county. "Larger county" would just mean "more polling places" so that each polling place maps to about the same number of voters, therefore the load is distributed smoothly. The longest line I've ever seen in a polling station was 10 people who showed up in a group, and it took only 5 minutes to serve all of them.
      - godelski 6y ago
        Is this true or are you just guessing? If it is true I'd like some reference to back it up because to me this doesn't even make sense logistically. Like the same effect is true in distributed computing so it would be extra weird for humans to be far superior in this manner.
- chrisseaton 6y ago
  > There are scaling issues though. It’s literally an ‘embarrassingly parallel’ problem. A hundred people can count ten times the ballots that ten people can, and then merge their results.
  - godelski 6y ago
    This is a naive assumption. There's a few aspects that have to be considered that make it not trivially parallel. The first is that there are a lot of reduction steps where we're doing many to one communication. The more nodes you have the more communication there has to be and this is an issue. The second issue is that if we (naively) assume that there's a consistent error at each step, that the error will grow in each gather step. So if each worker has a 0.5% error rate, each gather has a 0.5% error rate, then our error rate depends on the number of workers and gather steps. For what it is worth there is at least a gather step at each poll station, then each precinct, then the state, and then the country. It is also likely that these all get worse as the election is closer and there's more pressure on.
- rsynnott 6y ago
  EU parliamentary elections are largely on paper; the EU has 100 million people more than the US. US elections are also operated entirely regionally; the largest US election is that in California, which is smaller than the UK.

godelski 6y ago

Yeah it makes more sense to have a digital tabulation, paper receipts, and a paper count later. You can also add in independent analysis by counting random subsets to do quick verification. Digital doesn't mean getting rid of paper ballots. And people are confusing experts advice of not doing "online voting" with "digital voting".