Presumably the first thing you want to do to avoid people confusing the envelopes is making the envelopes different colours, in addition to printing the name of the award on the envelope in large friendly letters of a contrasting colour.
You may also want to keep a really loud siren around in case somebody does mess up the announcement.
I never understood why the US system is so fixated on machine voting.
A piece of paper with clear indications on how and where to tick a box (totally old-school with a pen) are not exactly rocket science and easy to use.
The problem is that when people in the US vote, they vote. For everything from POTUS and congress all the way down to municipal dog catcher at the same time. Machine-based voting then becomes very interesting because there are so many races to count.
Here in Europe, we usually vote for one thing (or a small number of things) at one time. For example, here in the city of Mainz, in the state of Rhineland-Palatinate, in the federal republic of Germany, elections for the municipal parliament, the state parliament, the federal parliament, and the European parliament take place separately (usually in different years, even) and there is normally one (1) ballot to mark. This makes the old-school pen-and-paper method much more feasible.
this is not a good argument, imo. many German states use panachage and cumulative voting for local elections, in larger cities the ballot looks like a billboard with potentially dozens of votes.
here’s one used in Munich, with some 15 party lists and a sum of 80 or so votes for the city council members
the technology is super high tech: pen and paper with hand counting. surprisingly one hears a lot less issues with the voting process.
Yes, but that’s exceptional – we use these monster ballots only in municipal elections in some states (and state parliament elections in Hamburg and Bremen), and even then many people just pick one party’s slate as proposed (so just one cross to count). Even so, these take a lot longer to count than one-ballot state, federal, or European elections! Also, the ballots get that big only in the larger cities; in smaller towns the municipal parliaments have fewer seats to fill and you don’t need those wallpaper-size ballots.
The situation in the US is different in that there is usually a large number of simultaneous races that need to be counted separately, so there is a lot more work to perform on behalf of the counters. The other thing of course is that people want to know who won basically as soon as the polls close, and don’t want to hang around for hours while paper ballots are being counted, and that makes the idea of a machine where you just need to hit a button for the totals very enticing.
I don’t believe this is true, in my opinion only media and politicians, in a kind of positive feedback loop, insist on official results the second the polling places close. I don’t have a citation, but at a guess most of the voters are fine with a later but proper result.
and because of some nebulous “faster is better” the most important ingredient in voting is jeopardised: trust in the election process. a very bad deal.
Yes. It’s usually the media who claim this on behalf of “the people”.
I agree that, in the interest of transparency and confidence in the democratic process, voting procedures should be easy to understand and audit for people without an engineering or computer-science degree. As far as I’m concerned that rules out anything involving a computer.
as an PS: Germany is a bad example for a lively democracy with lots of polls. But what about Switzerland? The last polling date in Zurich had quite a few ballots to fill: 3 municipal polls, 3 national popular votes and by-elections in 2 school districts of the city. I don’t hear many complaints about the used means found quite early in the Tech Tree of Voting: hand-counted paper ballots ; )
I agree, but redundancy is a good idea as well, just in case it is the wrong card in the right envelope next time.
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