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Election Tech: In Canada, They Actually Count the Votes
Presto Vivace writes with this outline of what voting can look like while remaining countable and anonymous — and how it does look north of the U.S. border. "In Canada, they use hand-marked paper ballots, hand counted in public. Among other things, that process means that we can actually be sure who won. And if the elections of 2000 and 2008 are any guide, and the race stays as close as the pollsters sat it is, we might, on Wednesday, November 7, not be sure who won."
Any Canadians among our readers who want to comment on this?"
If we don't know who won, we won't know who to blame.. Exactly what the politician wants.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
10x the votes to count, but maybe it would be worth it. If you can mark an X, you're my kind of people.
Actually, we can be quite sure there will be errors in the manual count. The trick is to make the results official and accept them anyway.
Hey Terrance, guess who I voted for?
Who?
[Deep, hard farting]
AH HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA!!!
as someone who worked the polls in US in 2004 and 2006, I dont' think this is necessary. nor do I think teh voter id laws or whatever crap are needed. an educated person knows that you can use statistics to determine when results are fine and when they are questionable.
here's the key fact - it doesn't matter what the vote count is, it matters who has more than 50%. so if you do a count and estimate that a candidate got 55% of the vote, you can use math to determine what are the odds that the actual vote count is
second, you can compare results across counties and states to find any statistical outliers, and investigate those further if they are deemed necessary.
let's have a conversation! let me know what you think.
It gives the little old men and ladies a nice part time job for a while, and good times are had by all. I used to think that computer voting would be better but now that I've seen it in action, I'm glad we stuck to hand counting. Also it's fun watching the result get tallied, it's not instant so there is some buildup/drama.
Voting as entertainment and job market. :)
There aren't that many Canadians. The Count could count them in a day and still have time for all his Ah ha ha ha's.
We get away with hand counting because any one poll (vote collection point) is less than a thousand people. Each riding is many polls.
See Elections Canada for Details: what happens after a vote -
http://www.elections.ca/content.aspx?section=vot&dir=bkg&document=ec90565&lang=e
Following the close of a polling station, the deputy returning officer in an electoral district counts the votes, in the presence of the poll clerk, and any candidates or their representatives who are present, or, if none are present, in the presence of at least two electors. Before the count, the deputy returning officer must, in the following order:
* count the number of electors who voted and enter the number in the poll book
* count the spoiled ballots, place them in the envelope provided for that purpose, indicate the number of spoiled ballots on the envelope and seal it
* count the unused ballots, place them in the envelope provided for that purpose, indicate their number on the envelope and seal the envelope
* ensure that all ballots provided are accounted for
The deputy returning officer then empties the contents of the ballot box onto a table to proceed with the count.
During the count, the deputy returning officer examines each ballot, shows it to each person present and asks the poll clerk to tally the vote in favour of the candidate for whom the vote was cast. The poll clerk (along with any of the candidates or their representatives who also wish to do so) keeps a tally of the votes for each candidate.
Why is there an obsession with getting the the results of an election within hours/minutes of the polls closing?
In the USA elections are in early November, POTUS isn't sworn in until mid January. Take a week or two to count the votes.
Was it Nixon, or Roosevelt who took us off the gold standard?
Americans have become amongst the most compliant people on earth. They'll do anything for an extra channel on the satellite.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
The real difference is that when we vote, all we vote for is the local representative. Unlike the US, we actually allow the politicians to govern, for better or worse. What we don't have is a gazillion citizens initiatives demanding that the government spend money on new projects while preventing the government from raising taxes to support these projects.
Enshrined within the constitution is the premise of parliamentary supremacy, which is exactly as it sounds. The vote of Parliament is supreme, it can even override the supreme court (though only for a period of 5 years). Binding referendums are thus, by definition, unconstitutional, and thus we don't have to do this stupid crap on election day.
If we don't like what they do, we turf 'em out in the next election. (Also, we have more than two realistic choices on the ballot paper)
...si hoc legere nimium eruditionis habes...
If we did that we would always be sure to accurately count both valid and fraudulent votes.
In Australia, for most purposes we still use paper ballots. (There are a few exceptions - ACT territory elections have *optional* computer-based voting, and NSW state elections have an *optional* online voting system for some absentee or disabled voters.)
On election night, officials at every polling place - who are required to sign a declaration, under penalty, that they are not politically active - do an initial hand count of first-preference votes (yes, we have IRV and STV ballots here) and the votes for the top two front runners. These are the numbers that make their way to the internet in a matter of minutes and are used for the election night media coverage - but they actually have no legal significance at all, they're basically purely for the media coverage.
The real counting happens the week after election day, when all ballots are transported to the local electoral office for counting. For elections that use IRV ballots (e.g. the federal House of Representatives), the ballots are all hand counted. For STV ballots (e.g. the federal Senate), they do use computer based counting, however the paper ballots are retained and a hand count can be done if necessary. If there are any issues that arise, the Returning Officer has the discretion to order a recount as necessary, without necessarily needing court orders or anything like that.
The *entire process* - opening the polls, conducting the polling, closing the polls, the first count, the second count, and any recounts - takes place in front of candidate-appointed scrutineers (not quite as good as being public, but it's close enough). Every candidate can appoint scrutineers to witness the whole process and make objections.
And this is how Australia has elections that are virtually unchallengeable - for a typical federal election, there will usually be at most one serious dispute, and only in districts with the tiniest of margins where they need a judge to make the final decision. Heck, we're experimenting with computer-based and internet-based voting systems, and no-one's raising concerns because the Electoral Commission has such a high reputation for integrity and accuracy.
Sure, I can comment.
Elections canada uses people from the local ridings to physically count the paper ballots. My friend's mom used to volunteer, perhaps she still does. These are paper ballots that are an unambiguous record of the votes cast. While I often don't like the results, since observers can (and do) watch the ballot counting process, and since one can simply count the physical artifacts of the vote again, I tend not to mistrust the results.
The process is sound. In the US there are 10 times as many people, so go get yourself 10 times as many volunteers. You'll have results in real time, just as we do.
Watch my words, I tend not to mistrust the results. Anyone who wants to use another, less simple and tamper proof method with less observability or less permanent physical artifacts would cause me to mistrust them and any process they propose. Voting machines are neither an observable process (can't observe software running) nor do they generate physical artifacts (oops, the software printed the wrong candidate on the tape, too bad you were disenfranchised and didn't notice/couldn't change it).
I've been a scrutineer at a few provincial elections in BC, Canada.
Each voting area has a number of voting stations. Each voting station has a few non-partisan workers who check people off the list of registered voters, hand out voting slips, accept the marked voting slips, and at the end of the night, count the votes. Each voting station may also have a scrutineer from each party. The scrutineer is there to observe that nothing fishy happens during the voting process and that the counting is legit. The volunteers don't know which party the scrutineers represent and the scrutineers are not allowed to tell them (scrutineers can generally guess which party the other scrutineers come from, by process of elimination if nothing else).
The vote counting gets done that night, the results are known that night. It's dead simple.
In Germany, we had a long discussion about voting machines in recent years. In the end the Bundesverfassungsgericht (Supreme Court) decided, that present voting machines are not able to provide the necessities for a democratic elections, as it has to be anonymous, equal, and verifiable by any person. A computer counting votes, does not allow any verification. A computer with a paper trail, is hard to evaluate, as the log must be visible to the voter and if there went something wrong it must be changeable. Even though, it must be ensured that the machine is not printing extra votes, which would require someone standing beside the machine all time. Therefore, they ruled them inadequate for any election in Germany.
Beside that, they are still able to present exit polls, right after closing of the polling stations, and the preliminary results, are presented on the same evening. This is fast enough for my taste. The verified result is presented some days later. But, all elections can be recounted at a later time, by anyone if he or she is not satisfied by the results.
I am a poll worker in Virginia and work at the absentee precinct, where we receive all the absentee ballots for the county. We process the paper ballots and run them through an optical scanner. Self-printed ballots (typically received from military overseas), ones with tears, and ones unreadable by the scanner are put aside for handcounting. This is typically less than 20% of the ballots.
For small elections, the hand counting process can take 1-2 hours, depending on the number of races. In 2008, that process took over 7 hours because of the number of ballots involved (thousands).
While we can process and feed the ballots all day, we're not allowed to start tallying until after the poll closing time (7pm). I cannot imagine how long this process would take if all ballots were paper and hand tallied. Easily days. If you thought the 2000 presidential election stretched on too long, imagine not knowing who won for a week.
And this is not including the in-person absentee ballots received the month prior to election day using computer polling stations (we just print out the totals from each station).
Florida.
As long as you're using clearly marked ballots, and least you can figure out who one by careful counting even if it takes a few days. It's been 12 years since the 2000 election and we still don't *really* know who won.
Oh, and the Electoral College doesn't help much either - why should it be possible for a candidate to lose the election despite having a majority of the popular vote!?
There is a fundamental flaw in elections today: lack of consideration for "margin of error". In my opinion, margin of error should be calculated and any election which falls within the margin of error should either be held again or some sort of tie breaker should kick in.
Pretending that we can deduce the intention of every voter with zero errors is noble, naive, and ridiculous.
As long as the election precision is within the accuracy of the election measurement then either candidate is equally qualified by definition. Just flip a coin when things are within the margin of error. Things like bad weather, a flu outbreak at school, a big traffic jam, or a huge mega death concert down town can tip the number of voters. Elections are not perfect measurements of citizen will. they are a good approximation. No need to say that one politician got one more vote, he is more qualified. The fact that they are tied tells you they are equally qualified.
IN the national elections the last thing we want is to elect someone who got a few more votes. We want someone who earned their votes from as broad a base as possible. A very good geographic proxy for "broad base" is to outpoll in as many states as possible. This proxy is also useful since the senate has a small state bias that until we eliminate the senate, we need a president who won in a majority of the senators states if he's going to govern.
Thus we need to invent a system that to first order follows the popular vote, but that as it heads towards a tie that the winner is determined by who won in the most states. I just can't think of a good name for such a system.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
I'm in Montreal and I've served as a scrutineer. The system works pretty much as described in the article, but I can add a few details.
The voting section of the ballot is done with blank/white circles on a black background. This way, there is no confusion about making marks outside the lines. One circle and one circle only must have a mark for it to be a valid vote. The ballot is fairly large, maybe four by five inches or so, and that allows plenty of space between circles.
The counterfoils are strips that are torn off the ballot with the help of perforations in the paper. The counterfoils are saved in a plastic bag and the number of counterfoils is compared to the number of cast ballots as part of the process of counting votes. It's a simple process, but there is some human error. When I did it, the two numbers didn't match up. We were off by one or two, as I recall.
The biggest problem we had, and a potential source of fraud the scrutineers can do nothing about, is the list of registered voters. We get a stack of papers stapled together that contain the names and addresses of all voters eligible to vote at our poll (there are several polls at each voting location). This list tells us who has already voted in advance polls. Either some of these are in error or some voters don't remember going to the advance polls, but we had a few cases in which we had to refuse voters because they were marked as having already voted. Some of them got really angry, but there is nothing we at the polls can do about that.
The voting and counting are open to the public and to party witnesses. Anybody can watch the process take place, but it is absolutely hands off for them.
The hand-counting doesn't take very long. Each polling station (ballot box) only has to count a few hundred votes, which is then reported to the officer in charge of the voting location, and so on up the chain. The entire station - ballots, papers, counterfoils, etc. - are sealed in the box with special tape and returned, so that any recounts would be easy to accomplish.
"Even for Slashdot, that was a very obscure reference!" - Anonymous Coward
Well, there's a choice between hand counting paper ballots on one side xor letting computers decide the elections (while still permitting a human factor of uncertainty).
cpghost at Cordula's Web.
A number of years ago, the City of Los Angeles used my computer to count ballots for an election. Election officials told me that the entire process of counting ballots election night was just for the press. The real counting started the next day, when they started all over again. Checking the voting records for each precinct, copying the punch cards to tape again, reading the tapes backwards to make sure nothing was dropped - and raising a stink when the counts were different.
It took two weeks, and the results were the same. They were just more confident of the results.
Having lived for equal time in the US and Canada, I have noticed a fundamental difference in philosophy towards the voting process. The US seems to be very laissez faire. It is up to the citizen to figure it all out. The citizen must find out what needs to be done such as registration, where to do it and even just how to find the location of the necessary information. When I moved back to the US from Canada and wanted to vote, my voter registration card simply had "community center" as my voting location. I had to find a non-profit web site which listed voting locations to find out what community center and where it was located. We have never received any voting information of any type from the government.
On the other hand, the Canadian government not only wants citizens to vote but gives them all of the information they need in order to vote. When living in Canada, we received mailed notices from the government which stated the time, place and procedure. Making it very easy to vote.
Who better to give out the voting information than the organization which wrote the rules and requirements? Why must it all be left to partisan non-profits in the US?
Under present economic conditions the euro is essentially a gold standard for the less-developed nations (Greece, Spain, etc). You can see how well that is working out for them.
sPh
The Canadian descriptions of voting procedures are nice. But now we'd have to modify them to account for our (Washington State) and other states 100% vote by mail process. Don't get me wrong, I think it can be done. But the whole mail-in process opens up other cans of worms.
One thing vote by mail does is to eliminate the whole electronic voting machine fraud issue. There is a paper trail. It can be re-counted. I fear the day we switch to Internet voting. This is the home of Microsoft and I don't want some Russian script kiddie elected as our governor.
Have gnu, will travel.
Hand-counting may be prone to errors, but the errors are small and localized. It would take enormous resources to get away with massive fraud in a hand-counted system.
With electronic voting, on the other hand, you only need to exploit one flaw in the system to perpetrate massive undetectable fraud.
In fact, I can't think of anything else where we would want things done by hand versus machine in the 21st century.
What a ridiculous statement. Sometimes new technology is just new, not better. If you want to throw democracy down the sewer, then by all means go for electronic voting. As a Canadian, I'm happy to stick with our old, understandable and reliable technology.
Of all the things Canadians can mock about U.S. elections, your difficulty in counting up the votes isn't even the top of the list. The most mind-boggling thing is that your election campaigns take most of a year, ensuring that for about 20% of the election cycle, any given politician (including the president) is basically unable to engage in their actual job of governing the country and is instead campaigning. In Canada, election campaigns typically last about six weeks; before the election is officially called, campaigning is prohibited. The result is that politicians can spend vastly more time doing their jobs and campaigns cost vastly less money.
Oh, and don't get me started on how incredibly bad an idea it is to have elected judges, prosecutors, sheriffs, etc. Here (Ontario) I think there are only five officials we actually vote for: representatives in federal and provincial legislatures, city councilor, mayor, and school board trustee. Everyone else is appointed, usually de facto by committee.
If it's that close that it's difficult to count, does it really matter who wins?
Every election the candidates adjust their position in various issues in order to pickup different demographics of voters. Both of them compete by slicing up the American public based on different categories of group think, and picking a side on each issue. It's a like a complex game of Go where both competitors give up ground in some areas to take ground in others. And like in most Go games, the result is a near 50% split of captured area.
Given the above, if the wrong as far as you're considered candidate wins this term, it's not going to change anything in the long run, because next election, the game will start over, the issues divided between the candidates, and the result again will be a near 50/50 split. So in the end, it's a chaotic process, and regardless whether you accept the candidate who wins this term, you'll still have around a 50% chance of accepting or rejecting the next candidate who will win next term.
Here in lotusland, we also elect the park board. :) That said, in BC at least, I don't know why they still bother with school boards. The province has basically tied the hands of the school boards in terms of curriculum, negotiating with teachers, etc... so I really don't see why it's an elected thing any more.
...si hoc legere nimium eruditionis habes...
As a person fairly knowledgeable about technology and what can go wrong during its implementation and use, I am somewhat dubious about the use of unauditable unverifiable, proprietary computer systems for voting. However, many discussions of this issue are based on an underlying assumption that paper ballots and hand counting have an error rate of zero and a margin of error of 0%, and that is not the case. With the best will and good intentions in the world human beings handling 120 million pieces of paper will make mistakes, ballots will get torn, ballot boxes lost in transit, etc. Not saying it is worse than computer systems owned by big-dollar donors to a specific political party, but it is not perfect.
sPh
I've spoken to some Americans about this, and they say one problem with US elections is that the ballots are humongous. Many states allow voters to vote on propositions during election time, so when it comes time to vote you really have to cast tens of votes for all kinds of different things. (Any Americans want to confirm this?)
So obviously the solution to this is: Don't do that. Simplify things and get rid of the whole "Proposition X" nonsense. It certainly does nothing to improve democracy, but it's excellent at dividing communities and driving state and local governments into bankruptcy.
The system is similar in the UK. You go to your assigned polling station (of which there are many - probably no more than a few thousand voters per station, at least those I have known). You hand in the polling card that was posted to you in advance, or provide ID, and your details are checked, marked off, and you get a paper card. You walk to a booth enclosed on two sides, place an X next to the candidate you want to vote for, fold it and place it in the box. When the polls close, the boxes are sealed, and then that night or the next day the votes are counted by hand. I don't know exactly how the scrutineering is performed, but the low numbers of voters per polling station makes this feasible.
The duration of the voting process is there to satisfy the needs of our media machines. Expenditures for political advertising are directly related to the length of the campaign season. And the profits go right into the pockets of media owners.
The result of this is that a campaign in the USA is far more expensive than one in your (or other) countries with shorter seasons. And this drives the need of our politicians to raise large amounts of cash in order to sustain their next run for office. Cash that just goes into media's pockets. This preoccupies our leadership to a greater extent than the campaign itself. One other side effect is that this cash (also called 'free speech') in our country keeps politicians beholding to the special interests that raise it to support them. p>Shorter campaign seasons, less money needed from contributions, less influence over politics by moneyed (and not always domestic) special interests, better decision making for the good of the country rather than the few. Good things all around. So it will never happen
Have gnu, will travel.
Is it so hard to simply install touchscreens and have us vote through them, with the main PC parts being guarded, filmed and what not, not connect to the internet until it's over?
There are other significant difference between Canada and the US: In the US, you have to register to vote and the mechanisms vary from state to state. In Canada, almost everyone is registered automatically (data are taken from various sources such as motor vehicle registrations, income tax returns, etc.) And if you are not registered for some reason, you can register right at the polling station on voting day.
A second difference is that in Canada, federal elections are run by the federal Elections Canada department. This ensures that everyone uses the same technology to vote. In the USA, even federal elections are administered by the states, so people in different states may end up using vastly different voting technology (witness the 2000 election.)
Hence that 'Whoosh" you heard.
Now let us consider 'Manifest Density'...
No brain, no pain.
First, it's a tedious yet interesting process. Reps from each major party plus a couple of others are on hand as the ballot box is opened in Canada. Messed up votes ( and there are some dumb people out there ) get set aside and the count is done fairly quickly. Each party gets a call with the same numbers so they should have the exact same count as Elections Canada. It is transparent and both times I've done it, there were no shenanigans and I felt the process was proper. I felt good about participating.
Second, I sort of assumed it worked exactly the same in every other democracy in the world. If it's not open and transparent, then it's not really a democracy.
For a democracy to succeed, not only must the voting process BE fair, it must also APPEAR to be fair. When everyone KNOWS that computers can get hacked, and when votes are counted by computers, the level of trust drops precipitously.
In Canada during the recount in Florida for George W, we wondered why the fuss about the recount procedure. (two people, one from each party, are shown a punched ballot and have to agree on what the vote was, rinse, repeat.) This is what we do for every election in every polling station--why would anyone do it differently? In Canada the folks manning the polling station are paid (usually retired folks looking for a few extra bucks), and the guy holding up the ballot is paid, but the folks watching and tallying are volunteers. Every candidate has the right to put a representative into every polling station to watch the count. These are called "scrutineers". They watch to see that votes are tallied correctly, and can keep their own running tally. If the tallies of everyone are wildly off, they do it again.
In a post related to this, the fellow wrote about it taking 14 hours. This is the exception. The polling stations are numerous enough that there are not typically thousands of votes. In a recent election many polling stations had their results in in a couple of hours, and enough had their votes in within 4 hours that the winner could be declared.
Occasionally we have a recount and the original ballots are taken out and we do it over again. (I think a recount is automatic if the difference is down to a few dozen.) When a recount is done, the counting is DONE. With such a transparent process we all have confidence in the system, and no one has any basis for dragging it out for weeks and weeks. And it is voter confidence in the system that is important in a democracy.
As far as cost, there are perhaps two dozen paid people at each polling station and with the number of poling stations we have it adds up to quite a bit to run an election. But I ould like to see a calculation of the percapita costs in the US. The cost to manage and procure voting machines must be immense. If I had to make a bar bet, I'd bet the Canadian system is less expensive, much more reliable, and actually trusted by the people.
In fact one of the school boards did up a budget that the provincial BC Liberals disagreed with. They fired the (democratically elected) board.
Each voting "office" is basically a cafeteria table with 3 to 4 people sitting at it, and a voting booth with a privacy screen.
The jobs are:
1) The scrutineer that hands the ballot to the elector
2) The secretary that checks voter ID and addresses
3) The electoral clerk that simply compiles the voter ID by line number. He compiles the list hourly as the voters come in.
4) Optional, a representative from one of the parties to act as a monitor.
The voting is held in specially designated buildings like school gyms, church basements, whatever. There are obviously more than one of these tables per building, usually 10 tables to cover a decent area. The voter list has about 300-400 names, so each building can handle at least 3000 voters over the 10.5 hours they're open.
There are also a bunch of other people that monitor the overall proceedings and help voters as they come in.
It's pretty straightforward until you realize that at the amount of people they hire, there are different interpretations and personalities at work. At my table, the scrutineer was an idiot. I seriously thought she was retarded. The ballot is torn off a block of paper, folded three times and initialed by the scrutineer. The ballot is handed to the voter, he votes, folds it back, hands it to the scrutineer who is supposed to check that his initals are still there, tears off a stub and hands the ballot back to the voter who then puts it in the sealed box.
Easy, right? Nope, the scrutineer was unable to make a coherent sentence and the voters thought THEY had to put THEIR initials on the ballot. Of course not, the vote is secret, but people vote every few years, how do they know? The scrutineer also managed to tear off more than one ballot at a time.
I know we lost a few votes that way.
Anyways, the training would have been better if it were hands-on, since most of this stuff is motor memory stuff. Just sitting at a session two weeks before the real thing is not enough. There should also be a dry run before we let electors in.
The next problem is that the workers can't really leave the building for the duration of the voting. It was hot and stuffy in my building, and I got a headache. I used to work in warehouses in the summer unloading 18 wheelers and never got a headache.
I only stayed 11.5 hours, but the people opening the ballot boxes and counting them stay even longer.
Mostly random stuff.
The biggest reason why this works so well in Canada is that the ballot is simple. In a Canadian Federal election, you're voting for one position: your MP. There's typically around five or six names on the ballot. Mark one X, and you're done. This lends itself very well to hand-counting ballots: you can sort them into stacks quickly and someone else can count.
American elections by comparison are much more complicated, with numerous offices being elected at the same time (as well as propositions, and possibly other stuff I'm not aware of as a Canadian) and a significant increase in ballot size as a result. You *can* hand count that, but the manpower required to do it is significantly larger per 1000 ballots. It doesn't help that the ballot design in some states has gotten obtusely complicated.
Hand counting is the way to go, but it works a LOT better when the electoral system itself makes it easy.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
We still manage to elect assholes like Stephen Harper.
Only individuals (real breathing people not corporations, unions, societies et al ) are permitted to donate to political parties and there is a preset limit on contributions per year, about $1200 US, and there is no third party advertising, that is no SuperPacs, allowed.
But the really best thing is, Canadians do not elect a religious leader.
Undetectable Steganography? Yep, there's an app fo
Sometimes the good ideas come from places you would think of as "backwards". EVERYONE who votes, would be required to dip their right index finger into a PERMANENT ink that can't be washed off by soap, water, or chemical. Nature would have to wear it off as your skin ages and flakes off, which would take a few weeks or months. For the fashion conscience, make it a UV ink that would only show up under that type of light, therefore it wouldn't be seen. In the middle east, and other countries, they use a purple ink.
You're right. We should all be voting by putting our votes in the cloud using a mobile app that takes advantage of social media synergies.
That would be much more buzzword compliant then using a system that's worked pretty effectively for centuries.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
And you know what? For all the flak that got, the election officials in Florida in 2000 were doing the right thing - examining each ballot to try to understand the intentions of the person who cast it. They did so in full view of everyone, with observers from both parties.
The problem was that the Bush campaign didn't like the answer the counters were coming up with, so they staged a riot to stop the recount in the short term, and then made sure their pals on the US Supreme Court gave orders to prevent further counting from occurring.
I am officially gone from
If both candidates have half the votes then they should get half the seats each. Instead of letting statistics and chance decide if we get a minority government or a massive majority (and yes both can happen with a tight race). This also means that fringe parties can get a seat or two on focused issues by pooling their votes from across the country.
Antiquated is a meaningless metric for an election. What counts is accuracy, and hand counted elections have about a 2% error rate, which is pretty damned good. On the other hand, look at the botched messes that have come of some computerized elections.
I'll take proven 19th century technology that assures me to with about a 98% margin that my vote got counted properly to some private contracter's voting machine that doesn't even puke out a paper record.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Hand-counting may be prone to errors, but the errors are small and localized. It would take enormous resources to get away with massive fraud in a hand-counted system.
This is the key point I think. Hand counting done in a distrubuted fashion in a country where no-one is pointing a gun at you whilst you vote is pretty much impossible to influence at a meaningful level. It's not impossible there's some fraud in some remote areas, but I think we can be certain that it's not widespread and large enough to influence the final outcome. With electronic vote counting, all it takes is one bent provider of voting machines to completely change the outcome.
Why is there an obsession with getting the the results of an election within hours/minutes of the polls closing?
In the USA elections are in early November, POTUS isn't sworn in until mid January. Take a week or two to count the votes.
You're absolutely right, but I really don't see why we need to have a tradeoff. The problem with our trust in electronic voting machines has nothing to do with them being fast. The problem is that they are unverifiable.
I don't understand why we simply can't make voting machines that print out a human-readable ballot. You vote on the screen, you press the vote button, it prints out a ballot, you verify it is correct. If it is correct, you deposit the ballot on the box, certain that there are no issues such as hanging chads or otherwise spoiled ballots. If it is incorrect, you ask the voting official to destroy the printed ballot, and start the process over.
With such a system, as soon as the polls close, you have an instant unofficial result. Then you can take weeks or even months to count all the ballots deposited in the box for the official confirmation. If the manual count differs from the electronic count by a certain margin, an automatic recount is triggered. Now we have a reliable, trustworthy, and fast system.
Warning: Opinions known to be heavily biased.
From your source, TFA:
"with at least half a dozen of the demonstrators at Miami-Dade paid by George W. Bush's recount committee."
Whoa nellie! 6 paid demonstrators! dayum, turn the hoses on that unruly mob.
Look, I'm a liberal dem, but you sound like an idiot. Quit making us look stupid.
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Hand counting has a couple advantages. The counters, being voters, have an interest in keeping things honest. They also suffer the consequences of stolen elections and so are alert to the attempts. Machines don't have these features.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Before any one pats us on the back. The Conservative government of Canada is looking to move Canada to internet voting. What could go wrong?
I have hand counted paper ballets. Loads of them come back nearly impossible to understand who they voted for. People often vote for all the candidates. They make mistakes and try to fix them, and you can't tell which is which. Machines that can flag errors for voters would have more of them count.
Electronic voting prints a redundant paper receipt for each vote, so it works fine.
Marking an X, or bubbling in, or punching chads are all anachronisms that should all be phased out.
6 paid demonstrators, and a bunch of others who were identified as staff members to the Bush campaign and Republican congressmen who just happened to receive cushy jobs in the Bush White House. Organized, quite proudly, by then-Republican Congressman John Sweeney.
I am officially gone from
So who cares if votes are counted, if they do not count?
Canada is split up in 308 parts (electoral districts or ridings). Each little part has its own election. There is only one winner per district, those votes count. All other votes are tossed in the dumpster.
That is why you can rule with absolute power with less than 40% of the votes! Only in sub-saharan Africa. Oh, and Canada as well.
When the copyright term is "forever minus a day", live every day like it's the last.
Hear hear, I'd mod you up but I've already joined the discussion.
And I'll let the AC enjoy his diet of strictly machine-generated paintings, music, etc. while I'm at it.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Long election campaigns are a side effect of fixed election dates. Here in BC, now that we have fixed four year terms (May of every fourth year) for the legislature, campaigns now start in truth months before the actual vote. I'd say the last election in 2009 started in earnest right after New Years, but there was no lack of pre-election "buzz" even before Christmas. You have to weigh that against the traditional Westminster power of the Government being able to time an election to their advantage.
Not that maintaining the power to dismiss a legislature at the Executive's will always plays for the incumbent. There are no lack of incumbent governments who have gone to the polls early and have ended up losing.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
School boards in BC may be democratically elected, but they are creatures of legislation. The only independent legislature is one whose existence cannot be legislated away (ie. the English Parliament and all its descendants in Britain and the Commonwealth).
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
So you think it's fine that one party tries to obstruct justice?
The fact that people where paid to demonstrate against democracy should have put some serious questions in the national media headlines.
More than that, in the UK (and therefore I would guess in Canada as well), the political parties have the right to send observers to watch the count. There is great pride here in getting results out as soon as possible, so election results go out live the same evening and continue over the next day. Our tiny little village hall is used for our elections, population a few hundred I would guess. Open from 6 or 7am I believe until the polls close. Turn up, give my name, get a ballot paper, vote. Last local election I took my teenage daughter along with me to show her how it's done so in a few years time when it's her first vote she knows how it works. Friendly, relaxed and pretty corruption free (at least where I live, there are always the occasional issue, usually with postal votes in cities. They get caught).
Glad someone mentioned this study. The margin of error for machine-counted ballots was very nearly the same in this study, but voters overwhelmingly preferred the machine voting process to paper ballots. The machine ballots were more interactive, which was especially helpful to disabled and elderly voters, and were easier to read and to mark.
"We receive as friendly that which agrees with, we resist with dislike that which opposes us" - Faraday
They don't yet realise that it doesn't matter who the common people vote for, it's the electoral college that actually selects the president and that has become a tight knit group or sell swords that give their votes to the highest bidder. There's no democracy, direct or representational, in the United States and soon the people are going to become radically aware of that fact. The last several elections have gone to candidates that did not achieve a majority of the votes of the common people. Some states are trying to pass laws that will direct their electoral college votes to follow the voting pattern of that state's general population.
Looking ahead, if you think the Iraqis and the Afghanis can put up an insurrection wait until you see what they have to deal with in the States. They'll have to turn the army on their own people to maintain order and, I think, that's against the constitution. But, what the hell, nothing the current president has done lately has followed the constitution anyway. He just ignores the House and Senate and issues Executive Orders as if he were a king issuing proclamations.
You are dead wrong about "one exploit". In Virginia where I volunteer as a poll worker, the machines are only used to count the votes within one precinct. They are not connected to the internet (duh), and they are not aggregated (duh.) Voting totals are saved on hard disk, backed up to two thumbdrives, printed on paper, copied by hand, in ink, to a second paper record, then telephoned into the Registrar, where additional copies are made. A complete copy of all records, digital and hand-written, get sequestered by the court for 30 days after the election.
To fix an election, you'd have to go a whole heck of a lot further than attack a single exploit. We're not idiots.
"We receive as friendly that which agrees with, we resist with dislike that which opposes us" - Faraday
I always thought that the whole point of having computers count votes was to enable voting fraud.
As we all know, if your QA people don't test the right parts of the system, it's as if they never tested it at all. Paper vs. machine balloting presents a classic example of this "wrong test is no test" anti-pattern.
Voting machines excel at helping people cast accurate ballots. They have interactive user interfaces. They validate data entry. They have alternate interfaces for people with different needs such as the disabled and elderly. They can be tested for proper functioning, and if kept under good chain-of-custody conditions with multiple, independent observers, they can be very secure.
Paper ballots excel at recounts. They are permanent records that humans can read. They can be moderately difficult to manage and protect, because they are physical objects that can get lost, defaced, misplaced, etc. Their accuracy is only as good as the counting, on each use. If kept under good chain-of-custody, they can be very secure.
Many feel paper is better because it can be recounted. But recounts, by legal definition, are edge cases. A recount only happens when the vote is within a small margin, which is a very rare event. Since the vast majority of elections are not won by small margins, optimizing the voting experience for recounting is optimizing for the edge case. Classic "wrong test is no test" anti-pattern.
"We receive as friendly that which agrees with, we resist with dislike that which opposes us" - Faraday
As long as a majority accepts the current method, then it is good enough. That is the heart of democracy. You only need to adapt if the people feel that their will is not being heard. You don't need much science or statistical knowledge to explain feelings, that kind of stuff tends to just confuse and annoy the common person when they are feeling marginalized. Unsurprisingly, different people in different countries have different standards for what method is appropriate for their democracy.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
I hope everyone realizes that running a paper ballot through an optical scanner is exactly the same as using a voting machine. In fact, it's worse, because transferring data via hand-markings is many times less reliable than using a machine user interface. Optical scanning is a step backwards, IMHO.
But I am no fan of paper ballots. I think it's crazy not to use machines. Go to your bank sometime, and ask them to show you their hand-written ledger books with your bank transactions written on it so a human can personally recount them each month to make sure your account balance is correct.
"We receive as friendly that which agrees with, we resist with dislike that which opposes us" - Faraday
The chief problem comes in dealing with disputed elections. If a machine-based system (and it's useful here to point out that automatically tallying machines have been around for well over a hundred years) leads to a very close result, but there is no paper record/receipt kept, you end up with no backup mechanism (ie. a manual recount). That is ultimately the issue with the Diebold machines and the like. It wasn't that you had machine-tallying, which as I said has been around in one form or another for a very long time, but rather the machines were badly designed with opaque software that made understanding the underlying mechanisms very difficult.
Frankly, I don't think any mechanized or electronic voting system should ever be put into the field if the full source code and design specs of each machine is freely available for scrutiny and where a backup paper record is immediately available, or where, in the case that the printing functionality screws up (ie. paper jam) that the machine does not automatically shut itself down.
The reasoning, as is so often pointed out, is that an election must not merely be fair, but it must be seen to be fair. Entering your vote into a black box and then having that black box puke out the results, with little or no knowledge of how the data is stored, how the results are calculated and no backup means to count the votes in the case of questions of the black box's veracity, may in fact produce a fair election, but no one can ever say that it has been seen to do so.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
The US President does not need permission from the House and Senate for anything except funding issues and Advice and Consent for appointments and treaties. It is the House and the Senate that need permission from the US President for any new laws.
Declaration of Martial Law and suspension of basic rights are well within the power of the Commander in Chief.
also, the British House of Lords are appointed, not elected. I'm not seeing how that is democratic either.
"So you think it's fine that one party tries to obstruct justice?"
Nope. I never even implied that.
And if you think that just one party does it, pay attention to union protests, which are more often than not backed by Democrats.
It makes me laugh how people take sides over partisan TACTICS, because both sides use exactly the same thuggery.
What makes me a liberal dem isn't dirty tactics by the "other side", it is ideology.
https://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
Well, it looks like they make mistakes in Canada, too!
If Canada is so great, why haven't they advanced past this "our shit doesn't stink" garbage?
Use of the words "good", "bad" or "evil" is almost invariably the result of oversimplification.
Yeah, because democrats would never ever do that. *cough* Wisconsin recall *cough*
https://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
I actually helped to hand count some of the votes myself as an Election Officer in 2008. I can tell that , yes, we actually hand count the votes. In Canada we take the voting accuracy seriously.
Like, for instance, one political party posing as another with rude robocalls at annoying times, in ridings that have not yet clearly fallen in one direction or the other.
The counters, being voters, have a interest in the outcome so have MORE interest in lying in favor of the person they voted for. Not to say people will do it, but when has a computer gone off by itself and done it.?
History has shown that paper ballots are easier to use to rob elections and have a less chance of being detected, we know about all the stolen elections and attempts to change elections because people talked not because it was detected.
So with a history of rigged election, people who have a a greater interest of of not keeping things honest, you are happy that a machine does not do those things?
Nobody else notice?
That's the way we do it in 'Old Europe' and it works just fine.
You get reliable preliminary results on election evening and no Election in Austria, where I live, has ever been contested.
I'm pretty sure every time Saddam Hussein ran for President the ballots were hand counted. Of course he always got 99.9% of the vote, but at least there was no fraud.
No matter how you count the votes, the system of forced collective decision-making is irrational and unfair!
As for implementation of voting systems in a voluntary context, like voting shares in a corporation - I believe that transparency is the best policy (i.e. no anonymous voting means very little possibility of fraud). Failing that, you need a tamper-proof "append-only" log, for which paper works splendidly, and specially-designed physical materials can be even more difficult to tamper with.
(Signed: AlexLibman's sockpuppet.)
All Canadians should be aware and outraged that our effective and trustworthy system is under threat.
The fools in charge of Elections Canada have been looking into implementing online voting.
*not even electronic voting machines... farking Internet voting from your home computer!*
There is hope that this ill-conceived scheme will not go ahead but this is because of budget shortfalls, not because those in charge carefully examined the issue and chose wisely.
Please, take a moment to write a letter to Marc Mayrand, the Chief Electoral Officer about this.
The winner of the US election this November has already been chosen, and it will be Barack Obama no matter how the population votes. There will be no way to verify the votes from electronic voting machines, since they do not print a paper ballot, and anyone with a flash drive can install malicious code on them.
It's already happened, specifically in the Republican primary elections:
Short version: https://docs.google.com/file/d/0ByJAC-sfXwumZzI2bVlON2VTMnFyYVZZSnpDYnNyQQ/edit?pli=1
Long Version: https://docs.google.com/file/d/0ByJAC-sfXwumdkE4d0Y2eWtURTZ2eDM5RmlLc3ZhQQ/edit?pli=1
No need to depend on a coin flip or residual randomness: just have a runoff between the two tied candidates.
Why - you already have the votes recount them until you get consistency. This is not some physical measurement which has some inherent uncertainty. In the UK if the votes are within a certain margin the candidates can ask for a recount. I seem to remember in one recent election the vote difference in one constituency was single digits and there were several recounts (in this case demanded by the returning officer) until the result was consistent.
Of course this does mean that you need to be able to count votes quickly. There are no partial results in UK elections - each MP's constituency will only report when all the votes are counted with the first ones reporting within a couple of hours of the close of the polls. While projections of the next government are made early in the evening based on the early reporting constituencies nobody concedes defeat or claims victory until they actually, legally have it i.e. they have won enough MPs to form the next government. It was quite a shock the first time I saw a US election to see that politicians were making decisions on projections of who had won instead of waiting until they actually knew. Perhaps if they did that some effort might be made to increase the speed and accuracy of your counting.
(canadian)
We typically know who has every seat by the next morning. When you go into the polling station, they require you to prove your identity, AND where you live, (where you live is important for which candidate you vote for). This prevents ballot stuffing, and all of the fun stuff that happens in the US during election years, (voting machines "malfunctioning" in important districts, running backwards, outright ignoring who you vote for, etc.)
While it is possible to create a nationwide electronic voting system, it has proven to be far more trouble then it is worth. There is absolutely no reason to switch from paper ballots.
You just have to exploit before the machines get there. For example, you could buy off the company that makes the machines and have them put in some code that fudges the numbers.
In Canada they can also reconstruct who voted for whom should they wish to do so. Each ballot is serial numbered. Each person is signed in in sequence and given their ballot in that sequence. While no number for ballot is recorded one only need record the beginning of the serial numbers and then correlate with the sequence of the voters in sequence. Presto info recovered. Big Brother in action. Should they wish to.
In Halifax they have gone to a whole new level of insanity. A private company with no open auditing does telephone voting for municipal elections. The turnover of politicians has dropped to nearly zero since they implemented the new system.
Also the local parties such as the liberals have various electronic voting schemes. One blew up years ago with completely nonsense numbers. If the numbers had not been total nonsense and instead reasonable yet very wrong they probably would have gone with the numbers.
They keep blah blahing about increasing voter participation. If they want more voter participation then have referendums on important issues. In our area I can see some real big issues that would get people voting in droves: a referendum for each section of the city to remain in the amalgamated city; a vote to significantly reduce the pay of the councilors; a vote to cut city staff way back; a vote on the crazy rules that have basically turned the left turn indicator into a stop sign on metro buses; getting a light rail system; a massive crackdown on the 3 crime ridden areas of the city.
These are issues that aren't touched but would get people voting. So if the choice is between one failed real-estate agent and a failed lawyer then oddly enough people don't bother voting. When the choice is something that matters then people will vote. Using low voter turnout to justify throwing away our open voting system is insane.
Any electronic voting system must print a ballot which is clear and is also the final measure of an election. The electronically gathered numbers should only be used as a temporary tally. The only benefit of electronic voting machines is that they prevent "hanging chads" and keep people from accidentally voting both sides of an issue or for more than a single politician.
Another area of election reform that electronic voting could help with would be ordered voting. This way you don't end up with 6 people running and one person somehow winning with only 20% of the vote with 80% of people voting anybody but the person who wins. Happened last time.
I might sound like I am 5 but the moron who our city has hired to run things name is Dick Butts and doesn't even really live in our city (Halifax). (Lives in Toronto.) Any good voting system would have these bums thrown out in a second.
Among other things, that process means that we can actually be sure who won.
Right, because ballot boxes magically reject illegitimate votes and are never tampered with. And of course, voters are always careful to mark their ballots in a clear and unambiguous way, so that nobody can ague about who they meant to vote for. Gee whiz, stealing an election based on paper ballots is impossible. Ask Richard Nixon if you don't believe me!
The idea that paper records are somehow more reliable than electronic ones is silly. There's something intuitive about a sheet of paper being more reliable than bits on a disk — but either can be faked. The secret, in both cases, is careful outside auditing. That's actually harder to do when you have millions of physical records that can only be organized and tabulated by (fallible and corruptable) humans.
Problems with electronic voting have nothing to do with the supposed inferiority of electronic records. It's about voting technology created by vendors who don't want to give up their trade secrets, so they can't prove that their machines can't be tampered with. If you make the whole process transparent (basically, hardware and software has to be open source, and there can be no secrets as to how the data is managed and protected) you have a system that's a lot more tamper-proof than any kind of physical record.
Paper ballots are the way to go. It is not a question of whether we the people can "prove" there was cheating. It is whether the county/state/federals can certify the election. With electronic voting machines, they can't.
it's all well and good to be encouraged by proper vote-counting but it doesn't matter that much when accompanied by celebrating a low percentage of eligible voters.
i'm a newer canadian citizen and i can't tell you how much voting is seen as civic duty compared to stateside.
All voting in Australia, at all levels of government, is hand counted. It sounds very similar to the Canadian experience. We have a couple of extra "complications" down here. We use a system we call "preferential voting", which I hear others around the world call "instant run-off voting". This means that votes are not a simple X in a circle, but the numbers from 1 to N (where N is the total numbers of candidates in each electorate). Like the Canadians and Brits we also have postal and pre-poll voting, and can vote "absentee" in any other polling booth in the country. And like those countries, we usually know the (broad brush) result 3-4 hours after the polls close.
The second complication is that voting is mandatory in Australia. So when one side wins everyone KNOWS they have the mandate of ALL of the people. I love the idea, mainly because I see voting a duty as well as a right. No apathy here boys and girls. Everybody is on the roll, and everybody votes! The fine for not voting is olnly $20, but they DO chase you.
(this is from memory from my experience as a candidate in the last Canadian federal elections).
Actually it is perfectly legal to campaign before an election, and even before being approved as a candidate by Elections Canada.
Electoral expenses and contributions are retroactive to the start of the actual campaign. However political parties transfer cannot occur before Elections Canada confirmed someone as a candidate. Contribution receipts also do not give the usual tax credit if the contribution was received before the confirmation. This, and with the low limits on individual contributions, does make it expensive to run a campaign outside of the usual time.
The voting system is electronic/paper. You mark your ballot in secret (standard HB pencil), usually marking several (school trustees, provincial or civic elected people, and also any referenda or whatever). Then you put your ballot into a re-usable folder with just the unmarked end sticking out. You walk to an electronic reader, and it reads what you put down (all in private), and if everything is correct, you press a button and your card goes into one box, and if its not correct, it goes into another box. Usually the reader will get it correct. If you pressed yes, your vote is automatically sent to a central location and tabulated there. All incorrectly scored ballots are read by real people and tabulated (unless the ballot is spoiled). All ballots are kept for 60 days in case of close elections/recounts. Elections Canada presides over all elections. There were some voting irregularities in the 2009 federal election which a federal judge and Elections Canada is looking at (someone had a robo-call machine calling people at 3:00 am claiming to be from a particular party...which would normally make people angry, but really run by the another party, and also another robo-call machine set up that told people their electoral office had changed --but only for people who were polled and asked if they were voting for a particular party. Even though the election happened several years ago, some elected public officials could still face a by-election, and likewise bills where the votes in Parliament were close, could be stricken if people are found guilty. Canada's electoral system isn't perfect, but its not bad.
Many states are how using mark-sense paper ballots filled out in _permanent_ ink, either by pen or a special stamp. As such, the ballots are both readable by machine and hand counts. Mind you, you do get a problem of ballots that look like reading a long newspaper article, especially in California with a lot of propositions on the ballot!
A voting system that produces a hard copy ballot that the voter can personally verify is the gold standard. The problem I have with open source is that how can you know for sure whether or not it is actually what is on the voting machine unless you personally loaded it yourself?
The Iranians did not connect their centrifuge-controlling PCs to the Internet and yet they suffered massive compromise.
If you can't think of several ways to compromise the Virginia voting machines, you're obviously not much of a computer scientist.
You can set them on fire... https://sites.google.com/site/ballotburn/
Here in Australia we don't have a fixed date for elections (First Tuesday in November is reserved for a horse race, not elections).
There was an election for local councils (think "county") two days ago (yes, our elections are held on Saturdays, not Tuesday).
We use preferential voting for most of our elections (I won't try to explain our Senate system - it's horribly complicated), which is different from first-past-the-post and proportional voting. It involved putting a number in each box next to a candidate's name; if there are four candidates, you number them one to four (one is your first preference, two is second preference, etc). The complexity results in a higher proportion of spoiled ballots.
Voting here is compulsory (if you don't vote, and don't have an excuse, you get fined). That also results in a higher proportion of spoiled ballots.
We still use paper ballots, so they can (and sometime are) counted over and over. We get a preliminary result by having the polling officials at each site do a first count on the night of the election - if the result is clear-cut, it may be declared on the night. If the race is too close, the ballot papers are recounted at a central location. It can take days or even weeks to get a result sometimes.
Using paper ballots means that setting up a polling place is easy and cheap: you need a table and chairs for the people handing out ballots, a place for people to mark their ballots (typically we use cardboard booths), and a ballot box (actually, we tend to have a separate box for each type of ballot paper these days, to pre-sort them); this is much cheaper than voting machines. So we can afford to have a fair few polling places (typically schools and community centres). That means each polling place only has a limited number of votes to count.
I have to ask, why do we need voting machines? I've voted in a number of states, my preference thus far was voting in North Dakota - you filled in a bubble sheet you should be intimately familiar with from school from standardized tests, then it was scanned by a counter as it was fed into the ballet box. The scanner would also reject the ballot if it was improperly filled out(you bubbled in for multiple candidates for president, for example). The ballets are held and are human readable for manual count purposes if necessary(though I think the margin of error for the scanners is actually lower than counting by hand). Handicapped voters can get assistance in various ways. Initial numbers are available within minutes of the polls closing, as they pull the data from the scanners.
I don't read AC A human right
You mark your ballot with an X in the proper bubble
You know, this makes me wonder, why an X? Aren't most bubble sheets designed for you to 'fill in the bubble' for easy electronic scanning? In ND that's what I did, just like for standardized tests in school.
I don't read AC A human right
I agree. My thought:
1. Still use professionally printed ballots. That allows you to practice stock control, anti-fraud measures, etc...
2. User gets his/her ballot and has an option - use the machines or a pen on paper on a desk(with curtains for privacy).
3. Machine only acts as an assistant - bigger font, reading out loud, printing, etc... Once the voter is done, the machine prints on the ballot provided by the voter, who can then READ the votes the machine placed. Any issues the voter gets a new ballot, and if the machine mismarked(vs the voter hitting the wrong button or changing his mind) it's removed from service.
4. Spoiled ballots(whether by hand or machine) are stamped/marked SPOILED and stored in a separate secure container.
5. Good ballots are fed into the ballot box through a scanner that verifies a good ballot and tallies the votes up.
6. After the election, the results are pulled from the scanners, then all the boxes are fed through the scanners AGAIN, to verify the results. A random sample of boxes are pulled for hand verification - the contents of Box X should match up between Scanner A, B, and hand. Mismatch triggers additional counting (A can't be trusted? Rescan everything that went through A: A&B can't be trusted? Check EVERY machine; hand count of all votes for election).
Heck, before I saw the miniaturized scanners I suggested using the school scanners - you know they work(from scanning through the school year), people have practice using them(important when you only hold an election every two years or so), you already own the machines(assuming public schools), etc... Scanners today can have a lower error rate than hand counting. You simply set the rules such that a 'spoiled ballot' is something not machine readable.
Personally, I believe that for elections, the surety of being able to audit/recount is more important than ease of use. I would have never bought the diebold machines without printers. Worst case, I'll buy more expensive printing voting machines, and only supply a few to each station for the handicapped to use - using cheap pens for everybody else.
I don't read AC A human right
[tongue in cheek] What other result can you expect on 7th November? Why bother counting! But since there is no socialist candidate I wonder what this means...maybe that the red party (republicans) wins? Hmmm, who exactly selected this election date?..[tongue in cheek]
[Check what happened on 7th Nov 1917, 25th October according to the Julian calendar]
I hope everyone realizes that running a paper ballot through an optical scanner is exactly the same as using a voting machine.
Incorrect. If you read the thread, the problem isn't necessarily the accuracy of any one count. The problem is ensuring that somebody hasn't managed to hack the machine to change vote counts in a way that can't be discovered through audit. With a margin that hit 1k votes(Florida), If I can hit 100 machines and introduce a 10% swing, I just changed the election.
In fact, it's worse, because transferring data via hand-markings is many times less reliable than using a machine user interface. Optical scanning is a step backwards, IMHO.
I'd suggest taking the accuracy of computer scanning up with the agencies that run/ran the SAT, ACT tests using scanotron sheets for decades.
Go to your bank sometime, and ask them to show you their hand-written ledger books with your bank transactions written on it so a human can personally recount them each month to make sure your account balance is correct.
And here's the other difference. I can audit my bank account online anytime I darn well want to. I reconcile my accounts monthly, matching up my known expenses with what they list. Any discrepancies means I investigate, and on no less than 2 occasions, call up my credit card company* and tell them there have been unauthorized charges(backed up by a letter sent out the next day).
Due to the anonymity requirement for the vote, I can't just check to make sure that my vote was tallied for my candidates. Thus the need for a system that's easy to audit. Given my position as a computer security specialist, that means that I don't trust results stored in a computer. Banking isn't a good example, seeing as how fraud occurs there all the time. I don't want my elections being decided by the most clever computer hacker, personally.
*Bank account has thus far been unscathed.
I don't read AC A human right
Not sure how you couldn't see the whole sentence....
" Hundreds of "paid GOP crusaders" descended upon South Florida to protest the state's recounts,[2] with at least half a dozen of the demonstrators at Miami-Dade paid by George W. Bush's recount committee"
Australia has compulsory voting and a preferential voting system: read that as, extremely high turn out, and a voting system where if your first choice has no chance of winning your vote passes onto your second choice and so on. All vote counting and redistribution is done manually at the polling places immediately the polls close. It has worked without problem for decades. How is it the US has so much difficulty?
I am sure the Australian Electoral Commission would happily advice the US on how to run an election.
Perhaps the US has been rigging elections of so long now there is no incentive to make the system work right.
Here when you vote, they ask you "do you have time to help us count tonight?" If so we are then paired with someone we don't know, get ~500 ballots to count, have to agree on the final count. The total is then quickly made.
Voluntary work, every thing is done in one hour. Really, US, ditch the voting machines.
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
Well, that may sound surprising, but there are many other countries where votes are still cast in the form of papers with names on them, that are later counted by candidate citizens... Like we do in France for instance. Here there indeed have been a fashion for voting machines half a dozen years ago, but there are less and less; the trend was clearly to more traditional paper at the last president elect in May.
Herve S.
it's still done by hand in Austrlia. I have worked in a polling booth and it is nice to see actual paper ballots, hand counted, and viewable by reps from anyone involved.
There was an unknown error in the submission.
Here in the Netherlands we vote for representatives in the first chamber of the estates general, the provincial estates (who indirectly elect the members of the second chamber of the estates general), the regional water authority board (to be abolished, in favour of indirect election by city councils), and the city council. Besides that, employees of companies with 50+ employees elect a representative of the works council.
We do not vote for an individual with executive powers. I think that is a good thing, since no simple proportional election will ever produce a majority in favour of a single individual, and a single individual will always do a bad job "representing" the diverse views on issues of a majority of the population. Executives like judges, mayors, governors, and ministers are appointed by the queen, who was herself born into the position of monarch. Mayors, governors, ministers, and whole coalition governments may be sent away with a simple vote of no confidence. Judges and the queen are have a protected position.
We did have one attempt to introduce an elected mayor, as a result of a coalition trade on another bill, but that was shot down by coalition party dissenters in the estates general before it went into effect, leading to the demise of that coalition and a new election. Interestingly, that coalition government proposed to strip the mayor of his most significant executive power (to manage by decree in case of local emergency) before allowing him to be elected.
The current election campaign (voting on wednesday) started little over a week ago. Less than two weeks is not a legal requirement, but just reflects a general opinion among political parties that the early starters "peak too early" and provide their opponents with ammo too early. An important factor in that is that the central planning agency of the government publicly forecasts the economic effects of the policies proposed in party programmes, and publicly takes note when proposed policies are too vague to use in macro-economic models, discouraging "fact-free politics". Even extreme left and extreme right comply, although in their case there is a big difference between the concrete policies they propose for the models and the things they say on television. Political parties obviously accuse the central planning agency of biases in whatever direction, and are very selective in accepting the results of the forecast, but the forecasts are still accepted as gospel when it comes too criticizing the weak points of opposing parties.
Opponents of the system have few arguments beyond it not being "modern/of the 21st century", and it being less "democratic" because we don't elect the most powerful executives (formally speaking) of the country. Fact is that foreign observers do rate the country highly for its democracy and transparency, and our head of state of the last 32 years beats any potential presidential candidate in the popularity ratings.
they can pass whatever they want either way
No, your 100 member example is flawed because there are two houses of parliament not one, the power to pass legislation is never just up to one individual because a single individual can't take a seat in both houses.
First past the post eliminates the fringe from the process.
You say that as if mob rule is a good thing? Also preferences only come into play if nobody can reach the post, if you get past the 50% post all by yourself then any preference dealing by your opponents is moot.
:). It worked quite well, he voted with Labor on most of their "big ticket" reforms during that term. Labor's "feasibility study" for the great firewall ended when the web site of the independent senator's main financial supporters (an anti-abortion group) turned up on the government's "leaked" blacklist as a propaganda site containing disturbing images.
The reality is that independents can do jack shit by themselves, they have to choose between what the the two major parties/coalitions are offering. Sure some horse-trading occurs but the larger party definitely has the upper hand in negotiations, parliament is not at the mercy of a few nuts even though those nuts can throw a spanner in either parties plans by siding with their opponents, they cannot -do- anything by themselves except make a lot of noise while picking a side. It does however mean that some people you don't like will have a voice in government, I personally can't stand right wing Christian ideology, I see it as the antithesis of the golden rule, but they do represent about 2-5% of the population in Oz and therefore their opinions and concerns should be heard (and fought against) in parliament.
A prime example of how this works in practice is the proposed "great firewall of Oz" which at the time I predicted would end with a wimper (as it has). All that noise was an attempt by the labor party to woo a single right wing Christian senator who (occasionally) held the balance of power a few years back ("Mr 2%" was his nickname, I'll let you google why
So as you can see, in such a system a smart politician is willing to take a hit in the polls if it means he can neuter a nut case until he is thrown out in the next election, in fact both major parties see such an situation as undesirable and often appear to collude against independents in a "good cop, bad cop" kind of way. It may be a torturous route to enlightenment about the true meaning of the golden rule, but I think that the right wing Christians got a very valuable lesson in the dangers of state sponsored censorship when they saw their friends appear on a the blacklist they had demanded.
If you go back into the history of internet censorship in Oz the first thing you will notice is that it has been around for nearly 20years now (coincidentally about the same amount of time joe average has been downloading porn). Both major parties have vigorously supported and attacked the idea at various times that just happen to coincide with one nut job senator or another demanding "something must be done". Any sane Aussie that's being paying attention knows it's just political theater, they know from their track record that the 2 major parties strongly support free speech. This, more than apathy, is the reason most Aussie's don't seem to care about the "great firewall of Oz", we 'know' it's a political honey pot for politically naive senators, we "know" the inevitable outcome because we've seen it all before, and not just with this issue, we have the same theater around other issues such as "multiculturalism" (re:Howard and Hanson). It's almost SOP for a sitting government in Oz...
- cuddle up to the nutters to gain their vote. - put up a half hearted bill that you know will be shot down in the senate. - string them along for the rest of their (inevitably) single term with endless "feasibility studies" and reworking of the bill. - just before the next election
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Now, that's just silly. The company would have to predict what will be on a ballot in the future to do that.
"We receive as friendly that which agrees with, we resist with dislike that which opposes us" - Faraday
OK, I'm game. Give it a go. Let's hear how you would compromise a Virginia voting process.
"We receive as friendly that which agrees with, we resist with dislike that which opposes us" - Faraday
We do NOT need to produce a paper trail in order to reconcile a close election. Think about it. A paper hand count will never be any better than a machine count because humans are not very good at repetitive tasks, and machines are. Give 10,000 people a column of 20 numbers to add. Give 10,000 PCs the same column of 20 numbers. Which approach is going to have the higher rate of error?
In fact, the only reason we allow hand recounts in the first place is BECAUSE people make mistakes, and it is simply assumed that we ought to recount when the results fall below a threshold.
But we can mathematically prove that a machine is working properly using a black-box test. We don't need to recount a machine, we need to re-run the black-box tests. If the machines are proven to be working, then the totals are the totals. We can more certain of a machine result.
"We receive as friendly that which agrees with, we resist with dislike that which opposes us" - Faraday
Well, I don't know all the details, but off the top of my head:
It really just depends on how much you're willing to pay. And if the paper trail prevents such fraud, then why not just use paper to begin with and forget about stupid compromisable electronic technology?
The error in the ballots themselves is greater than the error of a lost recount. The *only* solution to the problem is to abandon anonymous voting. We didn't have it for the first 100 years, and only needed it then because of the overt violence of the Civil War. The experiment of secret ballots has failed. Can't we go back to the better system yet?
Learn to love Alaska
There seems to be a notion that hand counting is 100% accurate. It is not and the real question should be what are the relative accuracy rates and the costs to produce them? If the margin of error of the counting method is well inside the margin of victory then there is no need to do a recount Some will say other systems are subject to fraud, but hand counting is also subject to collusion.
Personally, I still believe the best method are the mechanical pull lever machines. However, they are not modern ("sexy") and claims are always made of the cost to repair the machines to justify bringing in some form of electronic counting. Hard to believe that a low cost replacement could not be made in this day and age.
Canada has 1/10th the population of the US. Makes counting votes a lot easier.
Hell, their population is less than that of California.....
Or, you know, design the system so that affiliation is shown, and force it towards affiliation.
Cynical Idealist
Long election campaigns are a side effect of not having campaign laws that prohibit long campaigns.
Here's an idea; have your campaign start the moment you enter office. It's called 'having a good track record.'
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
I'm surprised that Mexico's voting system has not been mentioned at all, even though it has received full accreditation by the UN and has been consulted on or copied by many other nations. Just went thru a complete election cycle involving President, Congress and Senate at the Federal level, concurrent with many State Governor, Major. Council and Assembly elections (a total of 629 Federal and 1,461 State and Municipal level posts to elect). This system was further tested and validated by the fact that the sore-loser second place presidential candidate challenged the entire process, from the vote counting all the way to the laws that govern it; all challenges were found to be inconsequential to the result or even total hogwash. Given that there is a registered voter population of 79.5 million, of which 50.1 million voted and the final result was validated by a federal constitutional court, the system as a whole does merit taking into account.
The process began in the planning stage on 7 Oct 2011, proceeded thru the campaigns up to 1 Jul 2012 when voting took place, votes were tallied, totals computed and the process formally ended with the Federal Electoral Tribunal concluding all challenges, declaring the election valid and naming the President-Elect on 5 Sep 2012. More info: Spanish language overview of the 2012 process, http://www.ife.org.mx/portal/site/ifev2/Proceso_Electoral_Federal__2011-2012/ or an English language FAQ, http://www.ife.org.mx/portal/site/ifev2/Internacional_English/
In essence, the system uses paper ballots, direct one-vote-per-voter, simple majority victory, manual tally at the voting station level, computerized processing there forward. Election took place on 1 Jul 2012, 8:00 to 18:00, exit polls available after 19:00, preliminary results at around 4:00 the next day, final valid and legal results on 5 Sep 2012.
>>In Canada, They Actually Count the Votes
In Soviet Russia, the Votes Actually Count You!
In several instances hand counts have been very important since there have been mandatory recounts.
See below.
http://www.sfu.ca/~aheard/elections/results.html#recount
Closest races in 2011
François Lapointe (NDP) - Montmagny--L'Islet--Kamouraska--Rivière-du-Loup, QC - won by 9 votes (0.02% margin) after a judicial recount. Election night results placed his opponent Bernard Généreux (CON) in first place by 100 votes, but this was reversed to a 5 vote victory by Lapointe (0.01% margin) when the results were by validated. The judicial recount that followed was held automatically.
Jay Aspin (CON) - Nipissing--Timiskaming, ON - won by 14 votes (0.03% margin) on election night; Anthony Rota (LIB) finished second.. A judicial recount confirmed Aspin as the victor by a 18 vote margin (0.04%).
Ted Opitz (CON) - Etobicoke Centre, ON - a judicial recount confirmed Opitz won by 26 votes (0.05% margin). He was declared the winner on election night by 25 votes (0.05% margin); Boris Wrzesnewskyj (LIB) finished second.
Kevin Lamoureux (LIB) - Winnipeg North, MB - won by 45 votes (0.18%) in the election night tally; Rebecca Blaikie (NDP) finished second. A judicial recount is not automatic when the margin is more than 0.1%, but it was requested in this case by an elector. The judicial recount confirmed Lamoureux as winner, by 44 votes (0.17%).
Selective vision. I wanted to rant so my brain decided to ignore the data to satisfy that need. Happens all the damn time.
https://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
The problem I have with closed source is that how can you know for sure whether or not it is actually what is on the voting machine unless you personally loaded it yourself?
emt 377 emt 4
fight to the death?
Though the cynic in me thinks the tie breaker will be whoever has the most money in the bank.
1) punch in choices electronically
2) machine prints out paper ballot, voter checks whether it is correct and hits either "correct" or "incorrect". If "incorrect", paper ballot is visibly shredded and you go back to step 1.
3) paper ballot goes into locked container, electronic results are tallied instantly
If there is a call for a recount, the paper ballots are counted with representation from all parties present.
Regarless of how fair or unfair the vote counting is, or how representitive the electoral system is, the biggest differenace is how much is spent on elections.
Cost of election:
USA: 6 BILLION
Canada: 300 Million
EVEN if you say "yeah well Canada only has 1/10th the population so it is cheaper" which really isn't a valid arguement, but lets for fun say that is directly proportional, and so that. Canada would be 3 Billion were it the population size of the US, which is still only half that which the US spent.
Next, and most importantly how much money was contributed to political parties (i.e. how much bribes they are taking more less, or at least how beholden they are to specific groups anyway)...
Canada: 15 Million (or 150 Million in your crazy 1/10th population world)
USA: 1.6 BILLION
Either way the difference is startling.
However the political parties in Canada also recieve 113 Million in non-private funding, that is to say each party is given some money from government for their election campaign based on number of votes, seats, etc... No strings attached, unlike getting hundreds of millions from special interest groups or corporate consortiums.
This is why US politics is screwed, not because of electoral counting techniques...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_election,_2008
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_political_financing_in_Canada
In the days up through the 1950 I guess, the electoral college made sense. Today it doesn't.
We need to abolish it for deciding presidents and VPs. This way it can be nearer one person, one vote. Our system will NEVER be perfect, but it is better than the alternatives.
The Electoral College was generated to get a consensus in each area of the country, and have the electors decide from the consensus they deemed reasonable. Now days we elect electors, but states are mostly winner take all, and the granularity of the votes that count are pretty large, meaning that the real decision is a 'guess', not a count of votes.
Who's up for another constitutional amendment?
... "When you pry the source from my cold dead hands."
During federal elections in Canada each polling station can have a representative from each party act as a volunteer "scrutineer". They watch to ensure that the election officials are doing everything by the book. Once the poll closes each ballot box is counted by an election official in front of the scrutineers. Questions can be asked and each ballot can be inspected. Any spoiled ballots go on a special form. Once the polling stations ballots have been tallied each scrutineers typically reports the numbers to their party office. The counted ballots are sealed in a special envelope and one they go to where ever ballots go.
Using pencil and paper and counted ballots by hand we know the result of the election long before bed time. It's not rocket science after all.
Since each party had a rep watching the hand counts and reporting those numbers in to their own party offices it would make it hard for someone to mess with the numbers after the polling station closed. I think I have to repeat that, the counting of votes from each and every ballot box is witnessed by each parties representative and reported back to their party offices. If "Elections Canada" reported numbers that disagreed significantly with what your party rep reported, you would have more then enough cause for a recount.
Why the US has such a hard time counting ballots is beyond me. I know that their is a crisis in science and math education, but it is just arithmetic after all.
I was once told that in the US, even in presidential or congressional elections, the ballots may continue other options to vote for things like judges and dog catchers. I think if I was recommended US election reform, the first thing I would do is separate elections or even just the ballots. In Canada we typically have three different types of elections and they are never held simultaneously. We have municipal, provincial, and federal. We keep it simple and never have them on the same day.
I'm not advocating for closed source, I'm advocating for a system where it doesn't matter because you can always count the original hard copy ballot manually.
Canada wins again
The proper place for 'electronic voting' is in presenting a multilingual (including braille) interface where necessary in order to produce a physical, paper form which is *both* computer-readable *and* human readable. The computer-readable results are for fast, predictive counting, but the human-readable portion is the authoritative bit.
AFAIK (from my watching the process from the outside and reading the news), in Canada,
-We handwrite an X next to the candidate we are voting for.
-I seem to remember that the party of the candidate is NOT on the ballot. IE, you can't just say "I'm voting for my party of choice"-- you have to know the candidate you want to vote for.
-Each person voting is identified and checked off on the polling station list. You can't vote twice.
-You put your own ballot in the box.
-There are a number of people watching the election process in the polling station. AFAIK political people can audit the voting to make sure nobody is being coerced.
-At the end of the voting, the ballot boxes are secured and carried somewhere to be counted. The boxes are ID'd.
-Counting takes place with scrutineers that read the vote, say it, pass it to someone else, etc while the vote is counted. Political operatives can audit this process.
Given the above, it is surprising that there are sometimes 5-10 votes that are different on a recount. The process seems very well done to my mind.
The thing with the boxes brings to mind LBJ's congressional loss in 1948(?) when he was sure he won. The incumbent held back a few ballot boxes from districts he controlled, and released them only when he knew how many votes he needed to win. I don't believe that can happen easily in Canada (and probably can't happen in Texas, anymore, either).
Well, I'm Canadian, though living & working in the US for several years now. But we rarely have controversy about election outcome accuracy in Canada. Sometimes, I think it would be beneficial to have hand-counting in the US again. It might eliminate the endless accusations of fraud that we've seen in the last several elections.