4 ms·

> If you never hear about these things in your own country that means that apparently no one there cares. Or that they don't happen...

• orenmazor 14y ago
  what is this fantastic place?
  • Emouri 14y ago
    Denmark? I've never heard of these sort of things happening around here.
• ars 14y ago
  > Or that they don't happen... Yah, somehow I doubt that, unless you managed to hire god to run your elections. Humans make mistakes, and machines and systems that humans build mess up. If you never hear about problems that's quite worrying - that means no one is even checking.
  • sebbi 14y ago
    Well ... I live in a country without voting machines and we still manage to count all votes on the same day. There is no need for faulty machines, is there?
  • michaelhoffman 14y ago
    Other countries rely less on machines where this sort of thing is even possible. The fact that human-built systems are likely to contain errors is an argument for making these system as simple as possible. The fact that we use touchscreen voting machines in the U.S., with all the hidden errors (honest or malicious) they can introduce into the canvass, is insane.
    • wpietri 14y ago
      Yes! People are surprised when I hear that I, as a software developer, am utterly opposed to touch-screen voting and internet voting. California's system strikes me as ideal. Ballots are on paper but are machine-countable. Voters feed the ballots into the counting machines themselves, which verify that the ballot is valid (e.g., voted for exactly one person per race). If your ballot gets counted properly, the machine makes a happy little noise. I like this because it has the fast results of electronic voting, but it has a proper paper trail and minimum mystery about the counting process.
    • wizzard 14y ago
      Because having groups of random, untrained people squinting at dangling chads is less error-prone? What system, in your opinion, would minimize error?
      • jarek 14y ago
        > Because having groups of random, untrained people squinting at dangling chads is less error-prone? What on earth? I marked the candidate I wanted to vote for with an X in a circle on a paper ballot. Marking circles for more than one candidate is a spoiled ballot you can replace instead of depositing if you wish. This isn't rocket science.
      • fasouto 14y ago
        Normal(paper) vote with one reviewer per political party.
      • eric_the_read 14y ago
        Computer-based systems that print out a machine-readable paper ballot that can be hand-counted as well. You vote (perhaps with a touch screen, perhaps not) by making your selections, printing out your ballot, examining it, and inserting it into the tabulator once printed. There's still plenty of margin for error (for instance, the printer could run misprint or run out of ink, the tabulator could be buggy), and corruption ("here, let me file that for you...") but I think it maximizes the benefits of touchscreen voting for disabled voters while minimizing the downsides.
  • sek 14y ago
    We don't have voting machines exactly for that reason (Germany). There have been cases with voter fraud, but they got solved with recounts.
  • gpvos 14y ago
    Oh, they get reported on (Netherlands). Usually there are four, five polling places in the country where there are problems with voting boxes or ballots. Yes, we have problems, but a) there doesn't seem to be intentional interference, and b) the scale is a few orders of magnitude smaller than in the US.
• thechangster 14y ago
  Must not be a programmer if you actually believe bugs don't exist.
  • jarek 14y ago
    Are there problems ("bugs")? Sure. Are there problems similar in magnitude to the 'shenanigans' in the United States of America being discussed by morsch? Quite possibly not.