6 ms·

I think for places like Aus, NZ - with small populations and a handful of population centers, what you are saying makes a lot of sense. For a place like India,

by ghoul2 11y ago

I think for places like Aus, NZ - with small populations and a handful of population centers, what you are saying makes a lot of sense. For a place like India, the problems pretty much require electronic voting. I am old enough to still remember paper ballots in India. Imagine having to count of the order of 600 million(!) votes. Each with potential challenge from a partisan, validation, security. The costs and logistics were a nightmare. After polling, it used to take days just to get all the ballot boxes to centralized counting arenas. The machinery for the counting alone endedup involving about a million people! India has very strict election codes - how many voters to a booth (few hundreds), how far a voter can be required from his place of residence to polling station (3 miles max), etc. We also do not require "registration" before polling like in the US for example. Once you are 18 and have obtained a voter ID, you can simply walk into a polling booth on the day and vote. Indian Election Commission took a pioneering lead in using technology for polling - We have had near-universal electronic polling for 25+ years now. The trouble with the "moderm" voting machines is that they are way to complex and try to do too much. Indian design went the other way. Security of paper ballots was already an understood and mostly solved problem. The machines are simple - more in the league of a 8-bit microcontroller with 16 push buttons and 4x7 segment LED display. very old school. The machines rely on physical security. They cannot be opened without breakage, physical seals can be applied to their "reset" and "count" buttons, and access to them is controlled the same way as access to paper ballots and boxes would have been controlled. This allows even a poor country to deploy the order of half a million voting machines! There are of course issues - there is no paper trail for example, which as a concept has never even arisen in Indian electoral design debates. I am not sure I am myself sold on the need for them - I do see the importance, but its not an absolute. EVMs built on top for high end PCs, with Windows and millions of lines of custom code, manufactured by people who also build Slot machines (in the US atleast) is at least to my mind - simply another case of overdesign and overspending - typical of defence and government contracts. When security, reliability, are concerned, simplicity and even non-technical solutions combined with technology work better than compicated technology.

jkldotio 11y ago
"I think for places like Aus, NZ - with small populations and a handful of population centers, what you are saying makes a lot of sense. For a place like India, the problems pretty much require electronic voting. I am old enough to still remember paper ballots in India. Imagine having to could of the order of 600 million(!) votes." This scale argument is totally spurious. Australia is one of the older continuous democracies so we have had a lot of population growth since federation, vote counting hasn't slowed down each time the population has doubled (indeed I'd suspect it's gotten faster as people have telephones and over 100 years of institutional experience at the federal level). Counting votes scales because as the population scales you have more money and more people to count votes. Let's say you have two paid electoral officials and 100 volunteers for each 10,000 voters. A country with 20,000 people would have four paid electoral officials and 200 volunteers, a country with 1 million people would have 200 paid officials and 10,000 volunteers. Australia also has some of the most spread out and remote polling stations in the world due to our being much larger geographically than India so there goes that argument as well. Additionally it's far easier to get a cardboard ballot booth and paper ballots to various remote places than it is to get machines there. Not only do you have to lug machines around they need electricity and maintenance personnel. The Indian machines run on batteries, but how long until they need replacing if they are in storage for 5 years between each use? A more complex machine would need a lot more power than batteries could provide as well, and more complex machines would be needed. The Indian voting machines are having to add a printed validation, at great cost and adding complexity, so they are acknowledged as being flawed in their current state.
- ghoul2 11y ago
  I am not making any arugments - I am not sure what has offended you so much. I am simply unaware of the AU/NZ electoral systems. The parent post was making a point that paper balloting seems to work well in Australia, and I took the poster at their word. If you are insisting paper ballots worked well in India and machines don't, I can only imagine you don't know what you are talking about. The scaling you speak of doesn't work - complexities scale superlinearly and so do costs. We know this in our daily lives, in our networking architectures, when we argue scaleup/scaleout, etc. The economic scaling - money available per capita for spending on elections - also doesn't scale linearly like you seem to be implying. Even if, for the sake of argument, it did - I would prefer not to spend it like that if I can save money using EVMs. That money has better uses out here. Even with one of the largest paramilitary forces in the world, India needs to stagger its elections across a couple of weeks as the security apparatus moves around. That also doesn't scale. Paramilitaries are not maintained as a proportion of the population, but as per the security needs of the country. Local police should scale as per population, but India is significantly underpoliced. Also the Election commission tends to not trust local police with election security as by definition the police reports to and is allied to the incumbents. Elections don't happen once every five years - India has a central Election authority and the machines are constantly in use, shuttled all around the country as needed. I also don't understand what the trouble is with replacing batteries every few years? You have to remake cardboard booths and reprint ballots as well, don't you? No one said EVMs are cost free. "_ so there goes that argument as well_" Where are you "sending" these arguments? They don't seem to have gone anywhere at all. If you think polling 16 million people in a rich country is more complex than polling 815 million people in a poor one, please sit down and have a rethink. It is very very hard to fathom that difference in scale.

by ghoul2 11y ago

jkldotio 11y ago

"I think for places like Aus, NZ - with small populations and a handful of population centers, what you are saying makes a lot of sense. For a place like India, the problems pretty much require electronic voting. I am old enough to still remember paper ballots in India. Imagine having to could of the order of 600 million(!) votes." This scale argument is totally spurious. Australia is one of the older continuous democracies so we have had a lot of population growth since federation, vote counting hasn't slowed down each time the population has doubled (indeed I'd suspect it's gotten faster as people have telephones and over 100 years of institutional experience at the federal level). Counting votes scales because as the population scales you have more money and more people to count votes. Let's say you have two paid electoral officials and 100 volunteers for each 10,000 voters. A country with 20,000 people would have four paid electoral officials and 200 volunteers, a country with 1 million people would have 200 paid officials and 10,000 volunteers. Australia also has some of the most spread out and remote polling stations in the world due to our being much larger geographically than India so there goes that argument as well. Additionally it's far easier to get a cardboard ballot booth and paper ballots to various remote places than it is to get machines there. Not only do you have to lug machines around they need electricity and maintenance personnel. The Indian machines run on batteries, but how long until they need replacing if they are in storage for 5 years between each use? A more complex machine would need a lot more power than batteries could provide as well, and more complex machines would be needed. The Indian voting machines are having to add a printed validation, at great cost and adding complexity, so they are acknowledged as being flawed in their current state.

ghoul2 11y ago
I am not making any arugments - I am not sure what has offended you so much. I am simply unaware of the AU/NZ electoral systems. The parent post was making a point that paper balloting seems to work well in Australia, and I took the poster at their word. If you are insisting paper ballots worked well in India and machines don't, I can only imagine you don't know what you are talking about. The scaling you speak of doesn't work - complexities scale superlinearly and so do costs. We know this in our daily lives, in our networking architectures, when we argue scaleup/scaleout, etc. The economic scaling - money available per capita for spending on elections - also doesn't scale linearly like you seem to be implying. Even if, for the sake of argument, it did - I would prefer not to spend it like that if I can save money using EVMs. That money has better uses out here. Even with one of the largest paramilitary forces in the world, India needs to stagger its elections across a couple of weeks as the security apparatus moves around. That also doesn't scale. Paramilitaries are not maintained as a proportion of the population, but as per the security needs of the country. Local police should scale as per population, but India is significantly underpoliced. Also the Election commission tends to not trust local police with election security as by definition the police reports to and is allied to the incumbents. Elections don't happen once every five years - India has a central Election authority and the machines are constantly in use, shuttled all around the country as needed. I also don't understand what the trouble is with replacing batteries every few years? You have to remake cardboard booths and reprint ballots as well, don't you? No one said EVMs are cost free. "_ so there goes that argument as well_" Where are you "sending" these arguments? They don't seem to have gone anywhere at all. If you think polling 16 million people in a rich country is more complex than polling 815 million people in a poor one, please sit down and have a rethink. It is very very hard to fathom that difference in scale.