Well, in my country there are sometimes multiple elections held on the same day, eg local town or county and national government.
Each is done on a separate piece of paper. Different colour papers for the different elections.
The counting is done by a different set of people for each election.
That ballot was a complete shit-show and doesn’t show the issues beyond the design induced confusion. Who knew that Hanging Chad would become a proper noun? Chad’s a dick.
The problem with that is that we vote on EVERYTHING, from President down to the local dogcatcher, and all of the races are on the same ballot.
It isn’t a matter of counting the votes for two candidates in a single race on a single ballot. It’s two or more candidates in multiple races at every level of government on a single ballot. Can you imagine how many errors could creep in when hand tallying votes for more than 40 people?
In all the elections I’ve voted, we always had paper ballots to be hand-marked by the voter. We vote by filling in the little scantron-like bubbles. Then the ballot is fed through a scanner that counts them.
I don’t know why balloting and counting needs to be more complicated than that. I don’t know why there need to be all the complicated mechanical devices or electronic devices beyond that.
Mostly agreed, however for access and ease of use, I like the idea of a machine that fills in those bubbles for you. You’d still get your ballot, and if you want to fill it out yourself, go for it. If you want the machine to do so, you can go to one of those, punch in your voting preferences, it fills in the bubbles, then you can inspect the ballot for accuracy.
What I don’t like, and don’t understand why they are allowed to exist, are machines that leave no paper trail to be audited.
The point I was making was to show to certain people that there are many potential issues with paper ballots, and the hand-counting thereof.
Yep, I completely agree and was pointing out it was even worse than what that image shows. There are many ways paper ballots can suck.
Besides, hand counting deprives you of the modern safeguards we have against cheating.
Voting is substantially more secure than it has ever been due to document tracking technologies.
My ballot had a bar code on it. Although my name did not appear on the ballot, there was another document that linked my name it to the bar-coded ID. I believe I was asked not only to verify that my information on the first document was correct, I was asked to check for myself that the ID number matched the one on my ballot.
This means the automated scanners can’t count my ballot more than once.
This is an important safeguard, and one that does not exist with a hand count. There are no safeguards against a hand counter double-counting a batch of ballots. Machine counters have that safeguard.
Now I am totally in favor of paper ballots, or voting machines that print out a paper ballot. Some people think the “ballot printed from a voting machine” is insufficient because not everyone checks them. But if there is a problem with the programming, everyone doesn’t have to check them for the problem to be found. As long as some people do, the problem is certain to be caught.
And I will also mention that while people may not thoroughly check the ballot printed from the voting machine, they will almost always check the top line race. And, in 2020, all the false allegations of fraud were ablut the top line race and no one has suggested that the downballot votes were fraudulent.
On the contrary. In my country every part of the process is watched closely by representatives of all the political parties on the ballot. Any mistakes, or any attempt to cheat would be spotted. I have twice been an observer.
I would be interested to delve into this further, could you tell us which country you live and vote in?
I believe @Peter_Morris is from Britain, but his account matches my experience in Canada. In federal elections, there’s one ballot, for one position. They’re counted by hand, with scrutineers from the candidates watching closely. The federal elections are never combined with any other elections.
No offense, but there are three problems here:
Are the other elections also under as much scrutiny?
I don’t really see the benefit. Either of splitting the election between federal and local, or of hand counting rather than machine counting the bulk and hand counting a sample for audit.
Do you have separate elections for everything? In an election year, I have two or three federal offices to vote for, as well as between 1-10 for state, and finally between 0 and 15 for local.
Would each of these offices hold their own election, on its own day?
Federal, provincial and municipal elections are all on a different cycle. Federal and provincial have to be, because governments can fall and trigger an unplanned election. There’s no way to hold them to the same electoral cycle.
Unlike people, he says, straight faced.
And as far as this Lindell voting machine psychosis goes- Ok then, finally, once, prove that there was a specific problem with a single mother fucking machine already.
Are you sure you didn’t mean the 2004 election? That was the year that electronic voting machines took over in response to the 2000 paper ballot debacle.
There is no proof or machanism, and so by Occam’s razor the election probably was fair, but if I had to pick an irrational conspiracy theory to believe in, Diebold voting machine shenanigans in 2004 Ohio would probably be in my top 5. Diebold’s owners were big Republican donors, the numbers were a bit fishy, and Karl Rove told Bush Ohio was in the bag way before the numbers had been counted. etc.
Of course Kerry didn’t declare himself the winner and launch and insurgency to over throw the government.
Not just cheating, but accidental error. Machines are far superior to people when it comes to things like counting and math. People make more mistakes when they do things by hand. It would take a very large operation to hand count the 20-30 races for the tens of thousands of ballots collected in a large US polling place. That’s a lot of room for error, errors like missing or double-counting a stack of ballots.
A system that uses paper ballots in combination with scanners and tabulators has lots of safeguards against this type of error. Since each ballot has a unique ID number, you would get an error if you tried to tabulate the same ballot twice. If the system is one where the ballot is feed into the scanner by the voter - or while the voter watches- it’s not possible to fail to count a batch of votes. Plus, having scanned images of each ballot in addition to the original paper ballots makes recounts, audits, and investigations into possible fraud easier.
It’s the 21st century. These technologies are an everyday part of life and they are the reason elections have been getting progressively more secure.
Definitely. In my distant youth as a college student I worked a job as a ticket taker at a major stadium/arena (two large franchise sports, numerous concerts and shows). There were mechanical counters on the turnstiles, but we were required to verify all ticket counts by hand. So once the gates closed it was off to the counting room to hand count. Miscounts and recounts were constant and you’d have to keep doing your stack over and over until the discrepancy between hand count and turnstile counter was absolutely minimal (I think three). To the point where a certain creativity with comped ticket stubs (that didn’t pass through the turnstile), held in a pocket for just such an emergency, were sometimes creatively used just to get the damn thing over with. And these weren’t idiots counting - it was folks like retired accountants and teachers earning some extra weekend income.
No, I mean the 2000 election. Bush jr. vs Gore.
It was a very close election, and the result turned on a disputed result in Florida. Bush won by 537 votes.
Votes were made by machines that punched a hole in a card next to your chosen candidate’s name. Poorly-designed machines sometimes didn’t punch the hole properly. The votes were counted by other machines, that rejected many improperly punched votes.
Gore might have won if those votes had been counted. Perhaps. Possibly.
They weren’t punched by machines. They were punched by hand with a stylus.