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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!”
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. :)
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 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.
So, you're saying that faith in statistics is better than knowing for sure with an actual count?
FYI: You can use more than one person to count the votes.
“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.
Yeah but you also have 10x more people to count the votes, so it isn't an issue.
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.
Looking for obvious statistical anomalies only works if the person faking the data doesn't understand statistics.
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...
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.
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.
Florida.
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.
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
"The US population is not that dense."
are you sure about that?
You also have 10x more people who could count. Therefore, the size argument is a non issue. In Germany (60 mio) we can count the votes by hand (to be precise, we must count them by hand, all other methods have been judged to be intransparent and therefore not applicable to an election). And on European-elections (300 mio voters) we do the same in most countries. So it should be possible to do that in the US as well.
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.
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...
The population of Canada is about 34 million, which is a bit less than the population of California.
SInce the population of counters scales with the population of voters, hand-counting votes is O(log N) complexity and can easily scale to a country like the USA.
The O(log N) factor comes from the need to aggregate votes which is most efficiently done with a tree structure of aggregators.
The technique being used is wrong. High speed manual counting doesn't need optical machines, it needs a separate ballot page for each vote item ie president, mayor etc. Those ballots get seperated at the polling station when they are placed into the sealed ballot boxes.
Once counting starts, two people take a box, dump it out and seperate the ballots into piles, one for each candidate. You use two so that nobody can cheat. Then you count the piles. That's the basic methodology.
South Africa takes it further, we validate that the ballot has been stamped by the IEC, the elections body, and have party representatives involved in the verification. Our last national election had 17,919,966 ballots cast, 239,237 marked as spoiled and we counted in under a day and ran live TV broadcasts following the results.
The practice of putting many choices on single forms complicates the counting to the point you need optical machines to count it for you, and that is bad.
All that is needed is a simple ballot and polling stations spread with a suitable density, normally 6000-8000 voters.
Trying to become famous by taking photos. Visit my homepage please.
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...
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.
*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!
How do you film a virus? How do you guard a software flaw?
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.
10x the votes to count, but maybe it would be worth it. If you can mark an X, you're my kind of people.
this is what americans always bring up when someone questions their shitty paperhole machines and other voting customs.
it makes it look like americans think that every country has an appointed fixed number of voting officials from galactic council or some shit like that.
don't use the "MOAR PEOPLE!!" argument, since it's obvious it scales with the number of people.
you could use the "a smaller percentage of americans actually cares about the voting process" argument successfully though, since that's what it boils down to.
AND HAVING THE ELECTIONS ON WORK DAYS? is that some anti-commie thing trying to keep working men from bothering to vote? sundays aren't only work wanking around in the church - they're the perfect day for elections, since it being a national day off from work everyone has time to vote and if they wish to participate in counting the votes then they have time for that too.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
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?
In my country, each ballot is viewed by at least 3 persons. Two other persons count the votes.
As per how many ballots there are, they are counted out of the urn and then the number of people signing the register is also counted. Until that matches, nothing happens. If there is a mismatch, the whole vote from the voting "bureau" is cancelled.
Write boring code, not shiny code!
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.
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.
https://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
Then how do you explain that virtually every poster on this topic who is from a country where paper ballots are used is telling you that they have reasonably reliable results within two to three hours of polls closing? I suspect it is because you do not have people counting the ballots. The secret of a successful paper counting system is to have a lot of polling stations, each one that might only count a few hundred ballots. This also means you do not get the kind of fatigue one would expect from a manual count where only a few people are counting thousands or tens of thousands of ballots.
In other words, I think your manual counting system is being overwhelmed.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
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
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.
PR works well where this is a substantial centre party (eg Germany) and badly where there isn't (eg Israel). Most systems also have a lower cutoff, so you have to get 5 or 10% of the vote before you get any seats, which excludes the real loonies.
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.
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.
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.
That's an argument for the larger parties not to cave in to stupid demands from the coalition partner.
See what happens in israel.
If you have a coalition partner you have to cave to some of their demands, or they won't stay part of the coalition (even the Lib dems in the UK are going through this). But this actually happens on an issue by issue basis rather than on a coalition basis.
Minority governments, however you get them, are dominated by figuring out who is easiest to pander to on any given bill, and figuring out what you trade to them. Where I am (in ontario canada) the liberal minority have to trade things like more union protection, more taxes etc. if they want socialist (NDP, who are only kind of socialist these days) support, or less taxes and less regulation if they want conservative support.
And the pandering isn't necessarily related to the bill at hand. Want to sign a trade deal, you have to pass a language law, or do something with settlements in the west bank etc.
If the conservatives in the UK (who are the lead party in coalition with the liberal democrats) just decide they won't go along with wealth taxation, and the lib dems get their backs up about it, the UK will have to go to an election. Which could quite possibly end up back where they are now, needing another election. Etc.
Now the UK and canada examples are countries that don't have full on proportional representation (fortunately), germany is a sort of proportional - but the 5% cutoff keeps the "National Democratic Party of Germany - Peoples Union" (the neo -nazi's basically) out of sets, as they'd need to more or less triple their vote count. But you can see where this could go badly.
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.
Not really... The counting itself is performed by a team. Counts that don't agree are done over again. As many times as it takes to get a consistent count. With generally no more than about a thousand names that could ever use any given ballot box, the number of ballots to count is small enough that there's unlikely to be any real confusion..Everyone on a given team, as well as each witness, would have to deliberately conspire to commit fraud on the election for something to go awry.
And the witnesses that they get *ARE* official.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
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.
The US system excludes far more than 5% -- it's essentially pointless to vote for anyone other than the two main parties.
If their ideas are so crazy, those ideas will be rejected and the legislation just will not pass. If the legislation is important enough, the opposition will help get it passed, with some concessions to them.
First past the post just teaches the politicians that they don't have to listen to the opposition, and that means their ideas are seldom tested in proper debate with people who disagree. The result is stupid and ineffective legislation.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
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.
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.
The point is that you really don't have to trust the scrutineers: every party represented on the ballot has the right to have an observer present during the counting. Since each ballot box has relatively few ballots (500 or so), the count is quick. If your party can't muster a volunteer per 500 voters, you have deeper problems than vote fraud.
I know you are trying to illustrate a crackpot group of people that seem to stand for a common goal. However, if that goal is "don't vote for party/candidate X", then the party/candidate itself has no votable platform on which to stand.
You're after an example movement that people would rally around and vote for a candidate to represent. Any movement that is important enough to a large enough swathe of people that it overrides their desire to vote for a seemingly more appropriate party/candidate, by definition should have some sort of proportional representation.
If 30% of the country are so scared of their shadow that they want to instigate a full blown totalitarian regime, then they should have someone to represent them. That representation doesn't mean that they will be able to force any lunatic desires past the majority of other representatives, but it does mean that their candidate will (should) try to push things in that direction whenever the opportunity arises - as much as their idea might seem crazy to everyone else.
Perjury is a serious crime here.
Unless you're the Mayor. Then it's a matter of being too busy to tell the truth.
I'm an American and recent Canadian immigrant - I haven't voted here, in Canada, yet. But I've been receiving "you are registered to vote" cards for about at least a decade.
The point is: counting is only a fairly small, technical part of the problem. WHO VOTES is if anything, more important. not only outright fraud (double voting, or voting in the wrong riding), but clear campaigns of voter suppression (phone calls claiming to be from Elections Canada, but which provided a misleading polling place.) our current "majority" government might well be illegitimate - and oddly enough, Elections Canada is reluctant to make much of an effort to find out. on tactic is to delay any investigation - this has already succeeded in burying evidence of who paid for those misleading phone calls. other charming things: voting records have "disappeared" from close elections, where the margin (26 votes IIRC) were well within the "margin of possible fraud".
In short, the Canadian system definitely does not work well, and may have permitted profound errors recently. in comparison to the existing flaws, I don't see a lot of threat from the obvious issues related to non-paper voting. the country would clearly be better off if we had decent participation.
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.
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