Trust me, a room full of senior citizens can get pretty cranky when you tell them that they really need to count all the ballot boxes before they go to bed.
And arguing with the RO that he has to get out of bed, get changed, and drive back to the polling station because the trunk of his car is not considered a “secure location” for the ballot boxes his team couldn’t bother counting that night is also not much fun…
I have to say, a room full of vote counters has its advantages, but accuracy and security is probably not top of the list.
However, IIRC it has been reported that it takes people quite some time to feed the ballots into the machines, and that was what contributed to the in my opinion unacceptably long time it took to count the votes.
On top of that, there were problems with misconfigured machines.
So I doubt there is as much benefit to those machines that would outweigh the lack of trust in system. Especially because it appears that other countries are doing a better and faster job counting the votes by hand.
I’m not sure if you guys realise that if you need to go faster you should just have more pooling stations and more people to count. Most countries just do that.
The Wikipedia entry for voting machines is a long list of countries that tried to make it work, failed to do it or are endlessly stuck in suspicion of fraud.
Respectfully, that’s the most nonsensical reason to oppose using machines to tally the votes I’ve heard yet. There’s no way that humans could ever count votes faster than a machine could optically scan and tally them. That’s one of the main reasons the hand recounts took many times longer than the initial count itself.
Having more polling stations is more about access than speed. After all, there is a hard deadline for in-person voting.
And I don’t think you get the scale of some of these districts. Philadelphia, Harris County, Travis County -they all have like 4-5 million voters. It was hard to find enough volunteers to feed the machines, much less to hand-count the ballots.
You still seem to be hung up on machines = e-voting, which is not the case, while ignoring human error. Personally, I’m with @gatto that the level of participation achieved with vote by mail is worth the small amount of error due to voter mistakes, but I do think it’s reasonable to use the most accurate approach, which would be the Dominion-type machines.
I don’t have a dog in this voting machine fight (no strong opinion either way) but I do care about patently silly positions being staked.
You can’t seriously believe humans are faster and less error prone at a repetitive counting task than a machine? Machines of all types exist precisely because humans are error prone and slow at repetitive things. Humans get distracted, they get tired, they have bad days, and they’re limited by eyes and muscles. The first 50 years of IBM was built entirely on building machines that do jobs like counting marks on papers specifically because humans are slow and bad at it.
The real problem isn’t really whether the suit is frivolous or not. I mean obviously that is the problem but the practical problem is that getting to the point where a court determines whether a claim is frivolous or not can be made so expensive that a well funded litigant can force a defendant to settle even though the claim is bogus.
That’s basically Trump’s entire legal strategy (and that of many other rich people, Trump’s just such a good example).
It works where for example you tell a contractor that you’re not going to pay them what you agreed. Because you know that if they sue you for the correct amount, they’ll spend more on the claim than they’ll ever see in payment.
Where it gets interesting is when you have two stupidly wealthy litigants. London super mansion owners disputes are always fun. A russian oligarch suing a pop star over the pop star’s basement extension or whatever.
Or say a political campaign suing a state over something where the state doesn’t have a choice over defending or not. Like say, whether they ran a fair election…
But for normal human beings being sued by someone with more money than sense is one of the more frightening life events.
To be fair, it can go the other way - litigating against someone with no money and nothing to lose is also petrifying.
Suppose you have a voter in a district that speaks a different language much more fluently than they do English. Not enough people in that district speak that language to warrant printing ballots (including the text of ballot questions) in that language for that district (though other districts do have ballots in those languages) so they have to struggle through with their English ballot.
With a voting machine, they can select their language and see an official translation provided by the Secretary of State’s office for voters in that state. [Hell, some ballot questions I’ve read were complicated enough I’d like to see an XKCD Ten Hundred Words translation!] (Filled-out) ballots are printed by the voting machine on demand.
A voter is vision impaired. They may have a magnifier with them, but they may not. With a paper ballot, they may need assistance to read the ballot and mark the correct space.
With a voting machine, the machine itself could speak the ballot, increase the size of text on its screen, or provide other section 508 accessibility solutions.
A voter has arthritis or some other ailment that makes fine motor control like marking a circle with a pen more difficult and/or painful. As with the vision impaired voter, previously they had to have help to mark their ballot.
Pressing a button on a touch screen requires less delicate movement. A button the size of a postage stamp could be pressed with multiple fingers, a thumb, a stylus held between two fingers, or even the voter’s nose. [I just unlocked my phone by drawing the pattern with my nose to see if it could be done.]
There’s the problem of assembling this vast workforce every 2 or 4 years. I see the real struggles that election authorities have to recruit and train an enormous workforce for a single night and the consequences when some of their hires aren’t exactly top notch. It’s a very difficult job, and doubling the workforce that’s ready and capable of doing the job would be… challenging.
It would also be much more expensive, since they’ve already employed the entire pool of currently unemployed, capable and most importantly, available, people already. To interest more people would mean increasing the labour and training costs heavily, since you can’t just pay the extra workers more. This would make raise the cost of an election enormously, and while that can be done, I think many of us would prefer to see that money spent on much needed service if an acceptable alternative exists.
In recent elections, I’ve used a touchscreen to vote, but the machine prints out an individual card for me to check that basically looks like a scantron. It’s human-readable and machine-readable; it just prevents human error like making illegible or otherwise bad marks. Individual voters get an instant, tangible confirmation. The physical ballots are easily recountable. Best of both worlds.
I’m not sure if you realize that an entire political party in the US is devoted to reducing access to polling and making it more difficult to vote or have your vote counted. Disenfranchisement is weaponized in the States. In this year’s election, there was a county in Texas that had a single ballot drop box for 4.7 million people covering 1700 square miles. This is by design.
That said, it’s adorable that you think hiring people is easier than using machines for a repetitive manual job. The industrial revolution would like a word with you.
I don’t follow and I don’t see how your xkcd piece applies. When I’m finished filling out my human-readable, optically-scannable ballot at my local polling place, I drop it into a machine that tallies my votes with the votes of every other person at that polling place in a fraction of a second and then stores it in a locked box to in case of an audit or recount. Are you seriously proposing that a human could do this task as quickly and reliably?
I don’t see how relying on a human counting process instead of a machine counting process as the primary means of tallying the vote totals would solve any problems whatsoever. Either way you’d still have the possibility of fraud, mistrust or mistakes that could lead to a hand recount. The difference is that if we didn’t have machines to do the initial count the whole process would take longer and be more prone to human error instead of just the edge cases.
Having previously voted in a couple of European countries and now being an American voter, something that people outside the US may not fully appreciate is the complexity of an American ballot. In this last election I had to vote on the President and the Vice-president, one house member, one state representative and one senator, a mayor, seven or eight judges, a district attorney, five or six state measures, a couple of local measures, and probably other choices that I already forgot about. Other times I had to vote on the US senator, about seven State officials, the county sheriff, and the city and school district council members. These ballots are not easy to count manually and it takes time to tabulate all these choices. Machines are a big help for printing the ballots and for counting them.
The main problem is that in most places people vote for one thing at a time. For example, here in Germany, we have elections for the EU parliament, federal parliament, state parliament, municipal/county parliament, town mayor, etc. on completely different occasions (some of them are on four-year cycles, others on five-year cycles, and so on). In most of these you get one ballot where you make one or two crosses and that’s it. These are straightforward to count by volunteers who don’t have to have had special training in advanced rocket science beforehand, and even so it is virtually unheard of to not have a fairly accurate result a few hours after the polls close (actual official final results usually arrive during the next few days). Very occasionally there will be a referendum on some thing or other, but these end up on separate ballots that can be counted in parallel with the others.
OTOH, in the US they vote for everybody from POTUS down to the municipal dog-catcher on the same day, on ballots that could rival a copy of Moby Dick for weight. No wonder they want machines to help process these monsters.
Our voting precincts are fairly small (I’m living in a suburb of a city with 200,000 inhabitants, and usually there are two or three polling stations in our suburb alone, each catering to several voting precincts), plus you get to vote early or by post if you want to. Nobody ever has to queue more than a couple of minutes in front of the polling station if at all, and of course we always vote on Sundays so for most people there are no issues with getting time off work even if you do want to vote in person on the day. Usually it doesn’t look as if there are big problems getting all these polling stations staffed, and I’ve heard that often if there aren’t enough volunteers then municipal employees get roped in to help out. The public is invited to observe at all stages of the process.
All of these mean that it is in fact possible to run a democracy by means of fair and transparent elections where voting and counting are done entirely by hand. It’s mostly a matter of organisation and a will to succeed. What we see in the USA, instead, are deliberate attempts to keep parts of the electorate from voting, and that sucks.
