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How many people vote in Alameda county? Was building software to automate the counting really more efficient than doing it by hand with piles of ballots? In Au

How many people vote in Alameda county? Was building software to automate the counting really more efficient than doing it by hand with piles of ballots? In Australia RCV for a single electorate is done by hand. Each candidate can nominate a "scrutineer" to observe the process. Compared to doing it in a computer, it's like single stepping through the algorithm in a debugger. It's transparent as can be and a problem like this would be caught instantly. It scales fine! The process is roughly O(viable_candidates * voters). It's rare for more than 3 candidates to be viable, so in practice it reduces to O(voters) =~ O(electoral_workers) =~ O(population). As a "computer person" I'm a big fan of the manual process, but the implementation can be lacking: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/dec/06/missing-wa-senate-votes-lax-security https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/dec/06/missing-wa-sen...

duskwuff 4y ago
> How many people vote in Alameda county? It's the seventh largest county in California (out of 58), with 1.6M residents. Hand-counting votes is out of the question.
- andrewf 4y ago
  Looking through https://www.acgov.org/rovresults/rcv/248/ https://www.acgov.org/rovresults/rcv/248/ the largest RCV race was for Oakland mayor, with ~125k votes. Most races had <20k votes. An Australian lower house district averages ~105k votes, the largest has ~118k. Per https://www.acgov.org/rovresults/248/ https://www.acgov.org/rovresults/248/ the largest, non-RCV races (eg Attorney-General) had ~430k votes which still seems doable given the process is O(n). What I didn't account for in my response is the sheer number of positions voted for in a single election. An Australian voter typically votes for two things - House and Senate - and occasionally a single ballot measure on top. Australian Senate races are both more complicated (proportional representation) and cover much larger districts (New South Wales has ~5.4M voters). It can take weeks to declare the result, which is definitely a downside. https://www.aec.gov.au/voting/counting/files/senate-count-process.pdf https://www.aec.gov.au/voting/counting/files/senate-count-pr... Sources for the Australian numbers: https://peo.gov.au/understand-our-parliament/parliament-and-its-people/people-in-parliament/members-of-the-house-of-representatives/ https://peo.gov.au/understand-our-parliament/parliament-and-... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Division_of_Durack https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Division_of_Durack https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/people/population/national-state-and-territory-population/latest-release#states-and-territories https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/people/population/national...
- newaccount74 4y ago
  I don't know what voting in California is like, but here in Austria we have election districts ("Wahlsprengel") with just a few thousand voters each. For every district there are volunteers who observe the election and count the votes. It's all counted by hand. It doesn't matter how many voters there are, you can always count by hand, you just divide and conquer.

duskwuff 4y ago

> How many people vote in Alameda county? It's the seventh largest county in California (out of 58), with 1.6M residents. Hand-counting votes is out of the question.

andrewf 4y ago
Looking through https://www.acgov.org/rovresults/rcv/248/ https://www.acgov.org/rovresults/rcv/248/ the largest RCV race was for Oakland mayor, with ~125k votes. Most races had <20k votes. An Australian lower house district averages ~105k votes, the largest has ~118k. Per https://www.acgov.org/rovresults/248/ https://www.acgov.org/rovresults/248/ the largest, non-RCV races (eg Attorney-General) had ~430k votes which still seems doable given the process is O(n). What I didn't account for in my response is the sheer number of positions voted for in a single election. An Australian voter typically votes for two things - House and Senate - and occasionally a single ballot measure on top. Australian Senate races are both more complicated (proportional representation) and cover much larger districts (New South Wales has ~5.4M voters). It can take weeks to declare the result, which is definitely a downside. https://www.aec.gov.au/voting/counting/files/senate-count-process.pdf https://www.aec.gov.au/voting/counting/files/senate-count-pr... Sources for the Australian numbers: https://peo.gov.au/understand-our-parliament/parliament-and-its-people/people-in-parliament/members-of-the-house-of-representatives/ https://peo.gov.au/understand-our-parliament/parliament-and-... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Division_of_Durack https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Division_of_Durack https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/people/population/national-state-and-territory-population/latest-release#states-and-territories https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/people/population/national...
newaccount74 4y ago
I don't know what voting in California is like, but here in Austria we have election districts ("Wahlsprengel") with just a few thousand voters each. For every district there are volunteers who observe the election and count the votes. It's all counted by hand. It doesn't matter how many voters there are, you can always count by hand, you just divide and conquer.