Not seeing the problem from Canada, although we don’t have all our elections all at once. Except for municipal elections, it’s one small piece of paper, pick one.
8 Likes
Same ma’am. Same.
4 Likes
Duh dumb dumb, duh dumb
3 Likes
Doesn‘t happen much. We don’t have a two-party system, so the people collaborating on counting votes are all over the political spectrum.
I‘ve seen some of your ballots, and they were designed badly. Over here, when we vote on different things at the same time, each choice has a separate ballot, so you can separate them and count them individually. Federal elections are simple to count, because you only have two votes, one for direct candidate and one for a party. In state or municipal elections. you can have a lot more candidates, and you sometimes have a larger number of votes which you can assign to several candidates, and, if you wish, the remaining votes can go to a party. That’s more difficult to count. That’s more difficult to count, obviously.
I have followed the development and technical problems with voting machines for over two decades now, and I don’t think that is the way to go. These things are not secure and too simple to tamper with.
As long as you have a marked ballot, and marking the ballot is not overly complicated, counting machines are helpful. You still need to exchange configuration for ballots securely, and count some by hand to check if the configuration is correct. Especially for complicated ballots.
I wish we had a digital infrastructure secure enough for having people vote on much more than just candidates for parliaments or other positions, like liquid democracy. The more people can participate in politics, the better. But I‘m afraid we are not there yet, and the system‘s rigged against these things developing.
8 Likes
The simple fact of the matter is also that we have to wait at least until millennials are the bulk of the elderly generation to have a population that is competent with digital technologies enough through all generations that nobody is excluded by moving to digital voting, at least for the more complicated forms you propose.
2 Likes
One would think so. However, I know a surprisingly large number of millennials who are just as challenged with digital stuff as their parents.
5 Likes
Hence the “at least”. But then again, this is going to to be true for all coming generations as well.
4 Likes
Plenty of countries manage it, I don’t see any problem with a federal law banning machine counting. Perhaps the massive volunteer involvement in vote counting by hand would finally convince people that democracy is worth working for.
6 Likes
There can be scrutineers from all the candidates(parties) present at the local polling booth on the night of the election and at the combined count the week after. I have scrutineered at Federal, State and Local government elections for the ALP over the past thirty years. Usually only the major parties have people at all the local polling booths. Independent candidates and small parties have barely enough people to hand out how-to-votes let alone to want to stay back after the polls close to scrutineer. There are also rules of conduct to be followed by scrutineers. NEVER touch a ballot! If a gust of wind blows some in your direction, get out of the way.
The presiding officer phones the count of the lower house vote through to the tally room. Then a two candidate preferred count is done with the presiding officer opening an envelope with the names of the two candidates to use for this purpose. Then this count is phoned to the tally room.
We scrutineers also phone the counts through to the local party and then these numbers work their way up to our people on the various election night television shows so they can give insights as to preference flows before the official results come in. If you’re good you can get a sample preference flow during the initial count as you are looking at all the other candidates votes but not your own candidates votes. You want to make sure that a vote for your candidate does not go on someone else’s pile or that they get a vote that should be challenged as an informal vote. Their scrutineers should be looking at your candidates ballot pile .
It used to be that a very good indication of the result would be found on the night but with such a large percentage of the electorate voting at pre-poll ( more than 50% at the last Federal election) things are not so sure now. Though the writs don’t have to be returned for a month after the election.
11 Likes
Of course we could we do hand counts here in the US but why? Our system has worked for decades. It wasn’t until 2016 when the guy that won, he won for gosh sake, started setting up the whole rigged election crap.
He pushed it and pushed it until half of the voters, who trusted the system for decades, now had something to rally around to try and get their guy back in office, a guy who lost biggly.
Scanning and recording the votes electronically is a perfectly safe and secure way to count votes, the paper ballots are always available if there is an issue or a close race.
In my state the losers are saying they lost because the type of pen handed out was to intentionally spoil the votes, of course they have no answer when you point out that it would have spoiled all the votes so how does that benefit the democrats.
It’s absurd and we need to end this nonsense once and for all.
9 Likes
Much like vaccines and NATO.
10 Likes
Here‘s an article about electronic voting in the US that says:
Machines in use are not examined to determine if they have been hacked, so no hacks of machines in use have been documented. Researchers have hacked all machines they have tried, and have shown how they can be undetectably hacked by manufacturers, election office staff, pollworkers, voters and outsiders and by the public.
That statement would include counting machines. In the article you find a list of known incidents with voting machines, and of course there are unknown incidents as well.
5 Likes
Yeah, people seem to forget, that before the right was railing against voting machines, the far left / progressive left had plenty to say about them. Cory Doctorow talked extensively about them. XKCD had this popular comic .
It’s not been fine for decades.
14 Likes
I liked it better when elaborate theories of ‘the machines’ taking over were good old James Tilly Matthews versus the Air Loom gang and their sinister pneumatic chemistry.
5 Likes
They have been audited and there have been countless lawsuits in the last two years and not a single bit of evidence has shown the machines were hacked in any way that affect the election. The Wikipedia article uses questionable sources for many of the citations in the article but there were still no amount of errors that would have swayed any recent presidential election. Very local races could be decided by a handful of votes but those races regularly get recounted by hand. We have a safe and secure system with remedies for legitimate challenges. It’s illegitimate challenges that have messed things up
Like I said, there are numerous reasons a scanner counting our ballots is a better more efficient way.(in my opinion) If our presidential election was just for the president, sure count them by hand but our ballots have so many candidates and issues, I trust scanner more than people.
But the biggest piece of, evidence or better yet, lack of evidence are all the lawsuits that went nowhere and the investigation trumps administration did after the 2016 election which found nothing.
It’s also silly to compare US elections to other countries that have very different elections/ballots. I showed above how complicated our ballots can be.
5 Likes
Name one election that was rigged or the wrong candidate was elected because voting machines failed that wasn’t wasn’t challenged in court and resolved.
3 Likes
Lindell was not too far ahead of Lump in the brain line.
“Let the Republicans win. The Democrats don’t storm the Capitol in an attempted coup d’etat when they lose.”
5 Likes
