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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.
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?
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 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.
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!
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Perjury is a serious crime here.
Unless you're the Mayor. Then it's a matter of being too busy to tell the truth.