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"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,

"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.
- jkldotio 11y ago
  "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." I think you have misunderstood my argument. I totally agree that the Indian election is more complex. But I argue that complexity comes from places other than the counting itself, and returning to the subject at hand that means India's size and complexity in no way leads to the conclusion that its elections or anyone else's elections "pretty much require electronic voting". So in what follows I will examine the "ideal" case and then the rest of the issues. In the ideal case, if we imagine a theoretical Westminster system with first past the post voting, we can pay 10 people to organise 250 volunteers per electorate of a theoretical 200,000 voters. They all start counting at the same time when polls close. In this system there are always 800 votes per volunteer to count. It doesn't matter how big the population gets there are always 800 votes to count for each volunteer. Population of 1 million? 800 votes per volunteer. Population of 8 billion? There is still only 800 votes per volunteer. So the system is scaling with the population. Thus India having 51 times (using your figures) as many voters as Australia does not mean it's 51 times more complex to count up the votes. Similarly, nobody would claim that the counting the votes in the UK election is somehow magically 3 times as complex as the Australian one or that elections in Australia now are many times more complex that elections in Australia 100 years ago. Of course, leaving the ideal case somewhat, due to natural human variability a larger system will have more electorates that return their results slightly later. Indeed in an infinitely large imaginary system there might be an electorate where all 10 officials in one electorate die of a heart attack and it takes two days to get officials from other electorates to show up and do the count. In the real world with real humans, but still presuming they were operating on the exact same rules, the larger system (say the UK or the USA versus Australia) would likely have later returning results, but not by much. It's also worth remembering at this point that in many elections the last electorate to return a result is often irrelevant to "the ultimate result" as someone already will have a majority much earlier, many elections are conceeded by the loser well before the final tally comes in. That there, in the ideal case or the "same system" with real people, is the basis of my objection to your comment that "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". I am not saying there aren't other sources of complexity: many languages, poverty, illiteracy of some voters, poor transport and corruption will all take their toll. But those problems are not solved by voting machines either. I continue to maintain that 600 million votes does not in any way shape or form "pretty much require electronic voting".
DanBC 11y ago
Australia has a population of 25 million people. India has a population of 1.25 billion.
- jkldotio 11y ago
  And? This is like MapReduce, which scales well for certain problems, particularly those involving counting. If I am counting up the words in 25 TB of text in one case and counting up the words in 1250 TB of text in another, but in the first case I have 25 servers available to me and in the second case I have 1250 servers. How long does it take given in both problems each server is counting up the words in 1TB of text? Does it take 50 times longer to count up the words in the second problem? No, because there are 50 times as many servers. There are other issues which make the Indian elections complex, but counting the votes isn't one of them, and neither the counting nor the other issues mean that voting machines are "pretty much required" as was claimed.
Arnt 11y ago
The batteries in the Indian machines are replaced often. They're a kind you can buy cheaply in random shops, not like laptop batteries. (They look like the ones in smoke alarms.)

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.

jkldotio 11y ago
"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." I think you have misunderstood my argument. I totally agree that the Indian election is more complex. But I argue that complexity comes from places other than the counting itself, and returning to the subject at hand that means India's size and complexity in no way leads to the conclusion that its elections or anyone else's elections "pretty much require electronic voting". So in what follows I will examine the "ideal" case and then the rest of the issues. In the ideal case, if we imagine a theoretical Westminster system with first past the post voting, we can pay 10 people to organise 250 volunteers per electorate of a theoretical 200,000 voters. They all start counting at the same time when polls close. In this system there are always 800 votes per volunteer to count. It doesn't matter how big the population gets there are always 800 votes to count for each volunteer. Population of 1 million? 800 votes per volunteer. Population of 8 billion? There is still only 800 votes per volunteer. So the system is scaling with the population. Thus India having 51 times (using your figures) as many voters as Australia does not mean it's 51 times more complex to count up the votes. Similarly, nobody would claim that the counting the votes in the UK election is somehow magically 3 times as complex as the Australian one or that elections in Australia now are many times more complex that elections in Australia 100 years ago. Of course, leaving the ideal case somewhat, due to natural human variability a larger system will have more electorates that return their results slightly later. Indeed in an infinitely large imaginary system there might be an electorate where all 10 officials in one electorate die of a heart attack and it takes two days to get officials from other electorates to show up and do the count. In the real world with real humans, but still presuming they were operating on the exact same rules, the larger system (say the UK or the USA versus Australia) would likely have later returning results, but not by much. It's also worth remembering at this point that in many elections the last electorate to return a result is often irrelevant to "the ultimate result" as someone already will have a majority much earlier, many elections are conceeded by the loser well before the final tally comes in. That there, in the ideal case or the "same system" with real people, is the basis of my objection to your comment that "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". I am not saying there aren't other sources of complexity: many languages, poverty, illiteracy of some voters, poor transport and corruption will all take their toll. But those problems are not solved by voting machines either. I continue to maintain that 600 million votes does not in any way shape or form "pretty much require electronic voting".

DanBC 11y ago

Australia has a population of 25 million people. India has a population of 1.25 billion.

jkldotio 11y ago
And? This is like MapReduce, which scales well for certain problems, particularly those involving counting. If I am counting up the words in 25 TB of text in one case and counting up the words in 1250 TB of text in another, but in the first case I have 25 servers available to me and in the second case I have 1250 servers. How long does it take given in both problems each server is counting up the words in 1TB of text? Does it take 50 times longer to count up the words in the second problem? No, because there are 50 times as many servers. There are other issues which make the Indian elections complex, but counting the votes isn't one of them, and neither the counting nor the other issues mean that voting machines are "pretty much required" as was claimed.

Arnt 11y ago

The batteries in the Indian machines are replaced often. They're a kind you can buy cheaply in random shops, not like laptop batteries. (They look like the ones in smoke alarms.)