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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?"
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 is no reason the system could not scale. Since counts happen at polling station, providing you have enough of them in any district it would not matter whether the population was 30 million, 300 million or a billion.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Everything is easily scaleable. The count is done at the local level, with representatives from the major parties on hand to watch as the votes are tallied. It's a relatively quick process that usually only takes two or three hours (it can be slowed somewhat by spoiled ballots). In CEOs where the count is close, candidates can request a recount, a process that takes several days. All in all, it's a system that I trust more than electronic voting machines, simply because you *can* recount and reexamine all of the voter's original ballots. You can also have observers (from major parties and Elections Canada) actually watching the process in real time at thousands of polling stations, whereas an electronic system has the potential for massive centralized fraud.
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.
Well in Canada we do factor in error. It's called spoiled ballots. And the election is not a statistical analysis of the votes of the population, it is the actual votes. There is no margin of error. You mark your ballot with an X in the proper bubble, which is beside the name and party of the candidate. It's nice and big and so is the name of the person. There are many signs at the polling station that tell you how to vote in very easy to understand pictures and the people running the polling station can easily tell you how to do it without referring to any candidate. If you mess that up, your vote doesn't count.
Margin of error puts the onus on the system. For an election to work the system must be held to a standard of infallibility and that all errors fall on the voter, if it's found not to be the case and is significant to have possibly affected the outcome a re-election is called.
So the margin of error is factored in, but more is taken into consideration than a mathematical equation.
No need to flip a coin. If it's that close, the residual randomness of the process can be used directly: The candidate with more votes wins. Hardly surprising, this is how it's done already.
We still manage to elect assholes like Stephen Harper.
The problem with many electronic voting systems is they are weak at an important requirement for voting systems: Convincing the losers they've lost. If you cannot convince the losers they've lost and they start a civil war, the election is just a waste of time, money and resources.
With hand counted paper ballots, it doesn't take a genius to know you've lost if you (or your party's representatives) watch the votes being taken out of the ballot boxes and counted one by one, and the majority of the votes are for "The Other Party".
Yes you can still cheat, but it's a lot harder to do it and not make it obvious. The cheating is usually in the postal/zombie votes and gerrymandering, and in isolated/remote areas. The electronic system is just as weak in those areas.
With the electronic voting system - how are you going to convince enough people that no cheating is happening?
That's not an argument against proportional representation.
That's an argument for the larger parties not to cave in to stupid demands from the coalition partner.
Why not just a transferable vote system, which is essentially an elimination vote system without the need of a second or third ballot to decide the winner.
Oddly enough, mathematicians have spent well over a century now coming up with voting systems that deal with the kinds of situations brought up here, but the larger political parties in most FPTP jurisdictions want to retain their dominance, and do not want to mess with some of the more notoriously anomalous results that come from FPTP (or, more to the point, rely on such anomalies).
I remember reading a Scientific American article on the topic about thirteen or fourteen years ago that did a nice job of going over the different kinds of proportional voting systems and how they could be applied in the United States and the UK. The final summation was that there was no such thing as an absolutely fair voting system, but if you were looking for a more deeply flawed, unfair and ultimately disenfranchising voting system, it would be hard to get past just how bad the FPTP system. In three way races like there were in the last Canadian Federal election, you are often looking at almost 2/3s of the votes in a riding basically being tossed out the window, because all that counts is a pure mathematical plurality. If there 100 votes, red and white got 33 votes and blue 34, red and white's voters might as well have not even showed up.
The only defense I've ever seen of the FPTP system that makes sense is that it tends towards more stable legislatures because only the major parties have any hope of getting the number of representatives wearing their jersey to dominate it. Whether that is in Congress or Westminster or Ottawa, this is exactly what the entrenched political class wants; a system that may change the color of the government from red to blue or vice versa, but will give the odds of white, orange or yellow little chance of ever getting high enough numbers to interfere with the "approved" poles of power.
But when you consider that in a two way race, 49.9% of voters wasted their time going to the polls, it's hard to see how the stability argument can possibly override the disenfranchisement argument. In the United States, it makes even less sense than in a pure Westminster country like Canada or Britain. In the US you have a strong executive with an independent veto of legislation (unlike Westminster, where the weak executive of either a monarch or largely ceremonial elected head of state has stripped all but the pretenses of a theoretical veto power), so even with some sort of proportional representative voting system for Congress, a President could still moderate even the worst fringe party, and with far less likelihood that on a fringe matter that Congress could gather the necessary 2/3s of the vote to override it.
It strikes me that the US's division of powers is so refined that it literally begs for a different voting system, whereas too pure a proportional voting system in a country like Israel in fact allows small parties to punch far above their weight, to the point where they become obstacles to democratic will, rather than agents of it.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
But looking at countries that do use proportional representation, we don't really witness such things happening. There are several reasons for this:
1) Your example still assumes that, as in a first-past-the-post system, there are two main parties organized along a left-right axis, and that the vote would be almost evenly split between these two parties. However, looking at what happens in actual countries, we see that there is much more diversity in terms of political parties and ideology. It's first-past-the-post that gives rise to the two-party system, not the fact that, say, paleo-conservatives and free-marketers necessarily have to form one party, and environmentalists and auto workers have to form another one. Countries in Europe that use proportional representation typically have many parties: classical liberal parties, social-democratic parties, green parties, more radical left-wing parties, conservative parties, religious (usually Christian-Democratic) parties, etc.
2) There are thresholds that ensure that crazy people do not get seats. Even a 5% threshold does the trick quite well.
3) There are informal norms that say that, when truly crazy people do get seats, the other parties should not enter into a coalition with them ("cordon sanitaire"). Any party that violates these norms would be punished by voters at the next election.
4) Countries with proportional representation seem to have less partisan politics. Yes, there are still tensions between political parties. But bipartisanship is much more common. At the local level especially, it's not uncommon for social-democratic (nominally socialist) and classical liberal parties to enter into a coalition.
Yes, but that is A GOOD THING.
This means a single party can not simply institute whatever idiocy that comes into their minds.
1. If they want to pass something extremely one-sided, they will fail.
2. If they want to pass something moderately one-side, they will have to trade by passing something one-sided to another direction
3. If they want to pass something everybody agrees on, they have no problems
2 and 3 is what we call good governing. Note option 2, you apparently dislike so much has the build-in feature of optimizing passing of laws best satisfies the will of the people. A sort of free-market if you will of ideas for government, where the cheapest and best working ideas stand the best chance of being passed.
4) Countries with proportional representation seem to have less partisan politics. Yes, there are still tensions between political parties. But bipartisanship is much more common. At the local level especially, it's not uncommon for social-democratic (nominally socialist) and classical liberal parties to enter into a coalition.
That's the main argument I think. In PR you have to work together, things have to be discussed, and mistakes in concepts will be pointed out.
In the US, there are only two parties left, and it is virtually impossible to build up an alternative over a decade or two, while a small party can build up in the PR system, and get small responsibilities first; when tested, it can grow to a larger party.
NB: The message above might reflect my opinion right now, but not necessarily tomorrow or next year.