Maine’s marijuana referendum passed by a slim margin. Under Maine state law, the state will pay the full cost of the recount that the No On 1 campaign asked for. 500K is a lot of money, and our schools could use it. Why should the taxpayers pay for this? Ironically, many people(myself included ) voted Yes because legalization would mean saving taxpayer money. I’m all for fair elections, but sore losers should pay for their own recounts.
Of ourselves not. The job of the state in an election is to ensure a fair and accurate election if the vote is close and a method was used where the margin of error was greater then the difference between sides it should be the state that pays for ensuring their method was accurate.
The question you should be asking is if your state can switch to a better method of voting that would be more accurate then the current method such as getting rid of paper ballots entirely and removing the human factor.
What more accurate methods are there? Please describe them in detail, and keep in mind that machines can be tampered with.
A combination method is preferable: electronic voting which produces a paper-trail. Then, the paper trail can be used to audit the machine. That also allows the voter to have a measure of confidence the vote is properly tallied: such machines show the paper trail to the voter through a window, so the voter knows the vote was stored on paper.
As for the initial question:
Some states require that parties requesting re-counts pay for that recount unless the recount changes the result. I believe that, in at least one state I lived in, there was a threshold within which the state/county would always pay for the re-count; any margin above that threshold required the party requesting the recount to put up a bond to cover the cost if it didn’t change the result of the election.
The trouble with making parties pay should be relatively obvious. Suppose you are someone/some group without deep pockets. You want to challenge an especially close result. Strong indications are that a re-count will change the result. But you don’t have the money lying around to pay the cost (imagine how much it costs to re-count a California ballot initiative result, potentially). Should complete access to accurate results be limited to those with deep pockets?
I will also point out that, while $500,000 isn’t exactly pocket change, in a budget of $8.3B, it’s pretty much chicken feed. Or, to put it another way, since you mention Maine’s schools, $500,000 isn’t even enough money to add 10 teachers to a single year’s budget. So while one would prefer not to “waste” money, spending this isn’t going to appreciably affect education in Maine. Indeed, for the state as a whole, the wiggle-room in budgeting is likely substantially larger.
Or to put it even another way: Maine has 242 “school administrative units”. Each of these would be getting $2000 less in the coming year to cover the cost of the re-count. Maine has 620 public schools. Each school would be getting $800 less.
Scale of an issue is important.
It would be trivial to code the voting machines so as to print a hardcopy of votes precisely as they were entered and then digitally alter some small but non-trivial proportion.
And the only way that you can reconcile the electronic count with the physical count is by counting the hardcopy paper votes … which curiously enough is right back where you started. :smack:
You don’t want the voter to have a “measure of confidence” votes are properly tallied, they should expect total confidence.
This urge to have the results counted and announced within the hour of polling closing when the incoming president doesn’t take office for 3 months is simply bizarre.
<sigh>
You don’t have to fully count all the machines; you simply fully sample a few and look to see if there are any discrepancies. Then, if you don’t find any, you simply audit individual machines to see if they produce discrepancies between a few specific recorded digital votes and their paper trail. That’s easy enough to do without requiring a count of all votes on all machines.
And, if I’m not mistaken, is exactly how they handle it for such machines when they are used.
Electronic machines have many other disadvantages.
For example, you can’t vote without the machine. So partisan election officials can fiddle the number of machines assigned, so that areas that vote for their party have lots of machines, while areas that vote for their opponents have fewer machines, resulting in very long lines. (See Arizona 2016 for one c=recent example). When you vote with a paper ballot, like here, you can have as many people voting as you can fit into the polling place. Heck, we even once had power go out to a polling place – people just kept voting, by candlelight (it was in a church basement, so plenty of candles were available).
Secondly, every electronic machine with a paper ‘receipt’ that I know of produces a receipt that is recountable only by manual recounts – slow, expensive, & error-prone. While with paper ballots you just run them through the scanner again (or through several scanners, & compare results).
And, of course, electronic machines are much more expensive than providing paper ballots & pens.
Paper ballots and pens have issues, too. Stray marks can void the ballot. Marks that aren’t properly made can void the vote. People can end up arguing over what the intent of the vote was. Etc.
People act like paper ballots were the greatest thing, with no trouble. That’s far from true. And, of course, paper ballots can be manipulated in fraudulent ways as well.
And it would be trivial to produce a paper trail on an electronic machine that was scannable. I mean, really. I do shake my head sometimes.
If the state could guarantee that the original count was 100% accurate, I might agree with you. I suspect that the State of Maine would not be willing to do that.
The taxpayers should pay because the taxpayers have tacitly approved the law that says the taxpayers will pay. Seems pretty straightforward unless you think the laws should not be followed when they produce a result you do not like.
I’m sure you do.
Likely hold your breath, clench you fists and stamp your feet at the same time.
What psephological need do these machines you venerate actually satisfy apart from the capability to produce a tally more quickly?
Why the rush? Lots of other democracies can complete an orderly transition of government in a fortnight post-election. (Indeed, are there any, apart from the US?) The US takes a leisurely 3 months presumably because in 1780s the Founding Fathers were mindful that coaches, sulkies and ox drays didn’t travel so fast.
And paper based would alleviate the damnable expense, the ever-present potential for fraud, the multiplicity of different processes by state, the technical failures of infrastructure and software, the absence of an audit trail, the disproportional allocation of the facility to vote, the disenfranchisement from dissuading people with long queues and waiting times.
When I vote I record it on a piece of paper with a pencil. At the close of voting the ballot boxes are opened by AEC officials, scrutineers review my ballot paper and adjudicate whether I have completed it within the parameters for validity and if so it’s counted. It’s not perfect, but it sure knocks your voting machines into a cocked hat.
The referendum on education funding has also gone to a recount. How often, if ever, do recounts even change the status of a ballot measure?
Our municipal elections (the only ones with the multiple office votes common in US elections) use scannable paper ballots. You fill in the ovals for the candidates you want to vote for, return the ballot in a concealing sleeve to the election clerk, who puts it, sleeve and all, into the scanner. The scanner extracts the ballot and reads the vote, then deposits it into a locked ballot bin. If there is something wrong with the ballot (double vote, not clearly readable) it is rejected on the spot, voided, and you get a new ballot to try again. Quick vote registration and count, little or no argument over dimpled chads or other unclear votes, and a hard-copy paper ballot in case a recount is required. If there is a power failure, voters can choose to wait or to fill out a ballot and accept that it will only be scanned later and they will not be able to correct any errors.
Many US voting systems seem to go out of their way to make the whole process inefficient and unreliable.
A lot of that’s less to do with the election logistics than it is staffing logistics for the incoming administration. In additional to the Cabinet there are several thousand patronage appointments for the new President to make. In the UK only the ministers themselves and handful of political staff in each department are replaces, and the Opposition has an entire shadow cabinet in waiting. That’s why if the results are clear on election night the Prime Minister can hand in his resignation to the Queen the next morning and she can invite the leader of the other party to form a government by the afternoon. For the Commonwealth Realms just replace Queen with Governor-General.
Touche’ … and not to forget running the gauntlet/gamut of the confirmation process.
But equally the US decided that they wanted a partisan public service to come in with new brooms.
The flip side being in Westminster style parliamentary system the great unwashed voting public already have a view 1) on the likely Attorney General, Health Secretaries of State, Health, Defence, Agriculture et al, of the prospective incoming administration and 2) their competence in those roles based on their performance in opposition.