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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?"
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.
There's also 10x the number of counters
Why take so long? In Germany (population 80 millions), where they manually count the votes like in Canada using a highly distributed system, it usually takes less than 6 to 10 hours to _complete_ the counting for the federal elections. In practice though, exit polls and the first intermediary results (Hochrechnungen) are usually very close to the final result, so it is seldom a cliffhanger that lasts deep into election night.
cpghost at Cordula's Web.
In darkest Africa us 40 million South Africans vote manually, count manually and verify by holding each ballot up so that the polling station members can all agree. And we still finish counting by the next day.
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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.
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10x the votes to count, but maybe it would be worth it. If you can mark an X, you're my kind of people.
It works fine in the GTA(Greater Toronto Area). The population there is around 7.8m people. We just use more polling areas to make sure everything is accountable. The same reason why we have a voter ID system in place, because it bloody well works. Remember where it says "oath in front of an election officer, with them swearing for one person" Perjury in Canada can land you upto 14 years in jail. And the judge will throw the book at you. Perjury is a serious crime here.
Om, nomnomnom...
*whoosh*
Although, his (and your) point is a good one. In the UK we have ~650 people per square mile. In the US it's actually ~84 (http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0934666.html). The UK generally uses paper ballots, generally does recounts if necessary, and generally has the same over-the-top reporting of live results as they come in. The result is pretty much known the next day.
Sure, cities are where people live, lots more space in the US, yada yada. That's why they have postal and proxy ballot options, and if I can vote, 6000 miles away from where I live, I'm sure the US can figure something out.
Simon.
Physicists get Hadrons!
> some sort of tie breaker
For the record: for US Presidential elections, it's Congress and the state legislatures. That's clearly spelled out in the Constitution, and modified by the 12th Amendment. This came into play in the election of 1824, where no candidate received a clear majority of electoral votes. (One interesting quirk that most people are unaware of: in this event, the votes are BY STATE -- in other words, each state gets one vote for the President, regardless of size and how many electors in has!!!)
I'm not saying that the electoral college system couldn't be improved (or even eliminated), but the assertion that there is no "tie-breaker" is one that has been deliberately raised by both parties to allow them to slug it out in court, instead of handing it to the legislature, as is provided by the Constitution. In fact, the somewhat-complicated electoral system here in the US has "tie-breaking" built in, if it's followed correctly.
I was screaming back in 2000 that the whole quagmire in Florida could have been avoided if the Constitution had simply been followed. In that case, the state legislature should have gotten involved. The fact that it had a Republican majority at the time meant that Bush would have won anyway, but I'm completely fair when I say that: if Florida had had a Democratic majority in 2000, it would've been Gore, and I would have accepted that just as readily. ANYTHING rather than throw it into endless court fights that left half of America bitter to this day.
And I disagree with anyone who thinks that the Canadian model would work any better with our much larger population. The US is as divided as I've ever seen it, and there will continue to be close elections. I don't know what the final answer will be, but I don't think the Canadian approach would work here.
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Rice University determined that hand-counted ballots tend to have an error rate of 2%, which in most elections would be below the relevance of statistical margins of error. It is precisely this reason that when the leading candidates are very close (I think 100 votes in Canadian Federal elections), there is a judicial recount (a recount in front of a judge who will certify the resuls). Obviously even with this safeguard there are probably a few candidates who have been screwed out of an election they may have won, but I would posit that it would be a relatively small number since Confederation (1867).
Mind you, the key reason that there are such low margins of error in Canadian elections is because ballots, at least at the Federal level, are very very very simple. You simply have a list of candidates and their party affiliation with a box next to them that you mark with an X or check. Simple ballots means simple rules to determine what represents a spoiled ballot. In the US, ballots are often quite complex, with multiple elected positions be selected, as well as voter initiatives. As we saw from the hanging chad controversy in Florida in 2000, complex ballots can cause just about any counting system to produce a high number of errors.
It's also notable that in the US, the agencies responsible for managing elections and counting ballots are often politicized. Elections Canada is pretty fiercely non-partisan, and even with the robocall scandal, it is demonstrated that it is not afraid to take on the government that signs its paycheck. The idea of a Conservative or NDP electoral officer for any riding in Canada would be an anathema.
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I can't think of an election here in Canada where the final results are not known within 2 to 3 hours. The last election had a few more close races, so I think it was around 11pm Pacific that the various media outlets were calling the election.
Americans have been fed a lot of pure horseshit about manual voting, and yet I hear of no actual evidence of any of the major Western countries that use it where there is any evidence of any kind of mass screw ups or fraud.
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