I think my California ballot had 9 Prexy contenders too, and many of the usual suspects down-ticket. IIRC around here we see federal offices in even years and most state and local offices in odd years but with propositions and special elections to fill vacancies etc at almost any time, including in midyear. I recall five elections in one year. Then, and in similar years, I’ve exercised the franchise so much, I’ve damn near worn-off the sucker.
In a FRIDAY (1982) subplot, Heinlein mocked future Californians’ addiction to elections. Have we a metric anywhere of which jurisdictions globally are most infested with elections?
A person? No, of course not, and no one except you is proposing such a thing.
It is, however, indisputable^ that any number of elections are held in any number of electorates which are counted by hand and which routinely deliver results far faster and with far less mistrust than what seems to be the norm in techno-fetishist US.
Switzerland, maybe? Direct democracy is very much a thing there. How do they handle it? Do they consolidate their ballots US-style, or vote on single issues?
In my case, it’s Canadian elections that I’m involved with. And I’m pretty certain the same challenges of creating a large, one-use workforce apply universally.
America is exceptional comes in because of the complexity of their system. The difference between hand-counting and faster electronic counting becomes more significant and the size and complexity of the election goes up, which is why the electronic choice is more compelling in the US than elsewhere.
In Canada, we tend to see electronic systems show up in municipal elections, as they’re also more complex than our Federal election.
The delays and mistrust have nothing to do with the counting machines.
The only states that took a long time to count the votes were states that had rules in place forbidding absentee ballots to be counted until after the polls had closed. In no cases did vote counting machines deliver results slower than a hand count would have.
As for the mistrust, this had nothing to do with any problems with the security of the machines in question and everything to do with an an ongoing misinformation campaign from the Trump administration. If the initial vote count had been done by hand instead of by machines then the Trump campaign would have simply insisted that the human vote counters were corrupt (just as they did during the audits and recounts).
Only in the last one in York Region. It was a shitty laptops, wifi, browser arrangement. The UI was bad too. I’m not even sure that the USB ports were locked out.
Please point out where the flaws in this particular technology (Dominion, per the original post) are. Or in the counting machines. Because there are an awful lot of posters in this thread talking about insecurity or flaws in other systems which have been acknowledged, but are not at all related to this thread.
So you’ve ignored everything that’s been written on it in this thread. Cool. Why should anyone read your posts if you won’t bother to do the bare minimum of participating in a conversation?
The way I see it you have that backwards. The vote-counting machines for tallying ballots have been working just fine, functioning more efficiently and effectively than human ballot-counters ever could. You seem to be proposing that we throw out all those machines and replace them with an army of human vote-counters to solve a nonexistent problem.
I still haven’t seen anyone articulate how using humans to tally all ballots by hand would provide any improvement over a system in which the initial count is completed by machines that optically scan human-readable (and auditable) paper ballots.
The distinction is that the term “electronic voting” generally means casting one’s vote electronically, entrusting the security and outcome of the election to an unaccountable and difficult-to-audit string of ones and zeroes transmitted through the digital ether.
That’s not the same thing as using a machine to tally paper ballots.
Counting stuff by hand is something that people understand intuitively. It is easy for third parties to watch ballots being counted by hand, and to convince themselves that everything is on the up-and-up.
OTOH, if you feed a stack of ballots into a mystery machine and that machine “magically” comes up with a set of counts, it immediately makes people want to re-count the stack of ballots by hand just to make sure that the machine did everything right and the results are correct.
Here in Germany, voting precincts can have up to 2,500 voters (many of them have fewer, and of course not everybody who is entitled to vote actually votes). Counting a few hundred to a couple of thousand ballots with (depending on the type of election) one or two votes per ballot can be done quite efficiently and quickly by hand, so there’s not a lot of demand for expensive machinery to help with this, and the improvement lies in saving the government some money that would otherwise have to go towards the purchase and maintenance of ballot counting machines. We appreciate that the situation may be different in the USA, where there are lots of races on the same ballot.
Replace “ballots” with “money” and you have modern banking. People trust banks to count and hold their money when it’s all digital. We’re not even talking about that kind of trust level when it comes to ballots, because, if necessary, they can be recounted by hand.
People count money by hand all the time. With most businesses, before any money is brought to the bank you can be sure that it is counted just so there’s a cross-check when the bank says how much money it is. And of course you get a receipt on paper just in case there’s some error and the numbers on your account statement turn out wrong somehow. Nothing prevents you from doing the math yourself for verification as far as your bank is concerned, and many people don’t take whatever the bank does on faith.
If you have been following the ongoing drama in the United States over the 2020 election results and you already know that the same people who made baseless accusations about the vote-counting machines made similarly baseless accusations about the election workers doing hand recounts.
Yes, sure, but presumably if God Almighty in His omniscience had sent an angel to announce that Joe Biden had won the election, the same people would have made baseless accusations about that.
Indeed. So, again, if there’s nothing to be gained by getting rid of the vote-tallying machines then I see no reason to get rid of the machines that make it possible to quickly and accurately tally millions of complicated ballots.
Of course, if you have those already. Since the people who make baseless accusations will force you to do a hand recount, anyway, you might as well enjoy a quick initial result that is then confirmed later by the manual recount.
But this is basically a consequence of the unusual way in which elections are run in the US. Most other Western democracies seem to be doing fine without automated ballot-counting equipment.
You’re talking about the millions of bank notes that physically change hands while ignoring the trillions that move around electronically.
Tell you what - I’ll take the error of hand counting bills globally any given day, subtract the error of the amount transferred electronically every day, as a stipend.
