We do? A friend just voted by absentee ballot, and I think she only had ten, or maybe fifteen, things to vote on. And as far as I know, that’s about the number of votes I have to cast this coming Tuesday. I don’t think that’s an unusual number, is it? There are quite a few different offices to fill.
Ever consider the possibility that 2% of the population isn’t as diligent as you are?
Seriously, I gave some thought to what hand counting the ballots would mean for my vote. You’re missing some of the complications.
Let’s take as an example a ballot with eighteen positions and eight parties, along with two referendums, and a precinct with 500 voters. This would be typical of a busy election day at my local polling place.
This means that the counters would have to count and accurately position 500 x 20 = 10,000 possible votes among 18 x 8 + 2 = 146 possible grid positions.
This is doable, although it would involve some time.
Now the fun part begins. The numbers from each individual precinct go to the Board of Elections, which in New York State is at the county level.
The BoE must combine the results from the approximately 500 precincts in my county. But this is not as easy as merely adding.
Each of the 500 precincts has a customized ballot. There are many more than 18 races going on in the county, and only a few will be on every one of the 500 ballots.
The county must allocate results among the following voting lines: city council districts; city school board districts; city-wide races; county legislature districts; county-wide races; village positions; town positions; individual county school districts; various levels and districts for judges; other possible jurisdictional breakdowns; state assembly districts; state senate districts; congressional districts; state-wide races (both state-level and U.S. senator); the presidential race. And the two state-level referendums, plus any lower level ones. Except again for the few that are county-wide, each must be compiled from a different set of precinct results.
And in New York State, people can run as the representative of more than one party. So one person can be both the Independence Party candidate and the Democratic Party candidate; while another can be both the Independence party candidate and the Republican Party candidate. These extra votes can and often do make the difference in an election, so there is yet another level of addition and sorting to be done.
And then everything that crosses county lines must go through this process yet again on the state level.
So there is counting, allocating, adding, transmitting, recounting, reallocating, readding, retransmitting, readding from every precinct in the state (at least 10,000) through each of the 58 counties to Albany.
Do you begin to see how hand counting might lead to errors at some point along the way?
I’m not sure how many voters are registered in the average precinct, but it is common for more than one precinct to vote in the same place. I’ve heard of polling places with as many as 7 or 8 precincts voting. The total number of voters for such a place would probably come to something like 2 thousand. That was a total guess, by the way.
I mostly replied to you to clarify what is meant by ‘election judge.’ These people are election officials only, and are not actual judges in their normal life.
I am an election judge here in Seattle, and it is actually the lowest rank of election official. There is an election inspector to whom I report in the polling place, and lots of officials above her in the process.
Basically, an election judge checks each voter against the registration list, and issues the ballots. There are several duties that are reserved only for the inspector. For instance, she generally handles the much-discussed provisional ballots, and she delivers the ballots and voting equipment to the courthouse after the polls close (accompanied by me, because she’s registered as a Republican and I’m registered as a Democrat, and we try never to leave completed ballots alone with people of just one party). [By the way, in my state, voters do not register their party. As far as I know, election officials are the only ones that must state a party. They require this so that they can always arrange to have people from both parties in every poll team.]
So that’s actually twenty different elections - the probability that any one of a voter’s twenty votes is obviously much higher than the possibility of a single vote being miscounted, which is what I think the 2% figure supposedly indicated. (Can anyone actually find a cite for this figure, anyway? All I can find on the New Scientist site is this discussion of problems with US voting methods, which basically says that all methods are flawed.)
Well, by french standart, it would be a totally unusual number. Even adding up all the elections, we don’t elect that much people. We vote in six elections, total :
-the local councils
-the equivalent of counties councils
-regional councils
-parliament
-presidency
-European parliament
Plus, very rarely, a referendum. And as already pointed out, all these elections are held on different days, years, etc… So, it definitely makes a significant difference. I would assume that if you vote on 15 different elections at the same times, it would take at least 15 times more time. It wouldn’t take weeks, of course, but still…
Thanks. It’s much clearer now. We have the same over here, but they aren’t called “judges”. Hence my confusion.
That could be true if I were in charge of the polling station, or authored the regulations, but I’m only doing as I’m told.
Serious ly, the rest of your argument makes a lot of sense, and I must admit that a hand counting would be quite impractical in the case of the USA.
However, I must say that I’d rather have the french system, even a cumbersome version of it, than electronic machines working in mysterious ways and without paper trail. Call me a paranoid ennemy of progress if you want.
The Smithsonian site (already provided) is very good. I was really surprised at how rarely paper ballots are used in the US; they’re practically universal in Canada except for some municipal elections. In a lot of ways, simply placing an X on a piece of paper seems like the least confusing, most straightforward system of voting, with little potential for fraud. It also doesn’t take terribly long to tabulate results; we generally know the results of federal elections within hours, although that may be because the results (split between 3 or 4 parties) are usually such that projections can be made before all the ballots are counted. Sometimes a race will be called based on the first hundred votes that come in from a district, usually from a smaller polling place.
Now, that’s in Canada. American politics is an entirely different matter, one that’s always been far more interesting. The Smithsonian site discusses all sorts of fraud that used to take place with paper ballots. Also, Americans tend to vote for more offices in each election than typically happens in Canada. Most votes are a single X, or at most 3 to 5. Ballot measures are very rare and write-ins unheard of. It would take much longer to tabulate ballots for 10 offices than for one. And, with two major parties, the most interesting races can’t be called until the last vote is counted.
Another thing that surprises me is that you can’t register to vote on election day. You can always do that here, and it seems disenfranchising that there would be some sort of deadline to participate in an election. I think this is also to prevent fraud. It’s also strange that people register with a party – does anyone know why that is? Anything that ties a name to a likely vote invites fraud, and doesn’t really go well with the ‘secret ballot’ idea.
I think advertising is also a factor – the voting-machine is fairly large and advertises aggressively. There are always new and ‘better’ voting machines. Some of the methods are exceedingly complicated and prone to fraud, but I’m sure they still sell well.
One of the methods on the Smithsonian site was ‘DataVote’ – what’s that?
So that only Republican can vote in the Republican primary, and vice versa (if the state has a closed primary).
clairobscur, The quote was from a box in the magazine that is not reprinted online. But I found the paper cited:
Obviously, electronic voting without a method of rechecking is insanity, Heads will roll, roll I tell you.
Roches, Saying “It’s also strange that people register with a party” is like saying that marriage is religious. Neither is true in the U.S. but people tend to connect the two.
AFAIK, in all states you register to vote, period. However, in most states, if you want the privilege of voting in a primary election that determines candidates you must also state a party affiliation. It has no legal meaning whatsoever, but is a courtesy to make life easier for the two main parties. You can switch affiliation pretty much at any time before the election cutoff date.
Here in New York State you can choose to register as a “blank.” If so, you cannot vote in any primaries, but that’s all. You are as completely legitimate a voter as anyone who registers Democrat or Independence or Republican. It happens that in NY you can only vote in the primary of the party which whom you are registered, but even that is not true in many states. And in some states you do not need any party affiliation to vote in any primary.
Same-day registration is already in effect in some states. Sooner or later a sensible federal election database will be set up but that’s about the same time that a federal identity card will be required. Then being across a border will be the safest place when all the loonies come flying out of their bunkers in protest. :eek:
That’s nine or fourteen more things to vote on than we had in the last federal election in Canada, held in June.
We just had one thing to vote on: who did we want for our local Member of Parliament (which indirectly is a vote for Prime Minister). No votes for judges, or separate vote for Prime Minister; no provincial officials; no municipal officials; no referenda.
The election process for our three levels of government are entirely separate and never occur on the same day. That’s partly because we don’t have fixed election dates for our parliamentary systems at the federal and provincial levels. Only the municipalities are on a fixed election schedule. Far from wanting a single voting day, people seem to like having everything separate. For example, last year in Saskatchewan, there was a provincial election called in the fall a week before the municipal elections, and some people grumbled that the provincial election was too close to the municipal elections and would be confusing, since the polling places might be in different locations.
As well, the federal government runs its own elections, and the provinces run their own elections. You don’t have muncipal or county officials involved in federal or provincial elections, as I understand you do in the U.S.
The most complicated ballots we get typically are the municipal ones, because the school boards are sometimes elected at the same time as the mayor and municipal councils, and there are occasionally funding issues (e.g. - municipal debentures). That’s the only time I’ve ever used anything more complex than a paper ballot and a pencil. The last municipal election they gave you a paper ballot with dots to fill in, then the ballot was optically scanned. That struck me as the best system, since it combined a paper trail with a quick electronic count.
Federal and provincial elections, it’s just a piece of paper, a pencil, and an “X”.
Here’s what kicks off a federal election: the Writ of Election from Her Majesty to the local federal returning officers, directing the local federal returning officers to hold an election for a member of Parliament in the 300+ constituencies.
And here’s the form of the ballot, prescribed by Parliament in the Canada Elections Act. The same ballot is used across the country - no local variations, no ballots designed by local officials with party affiliations, etc.
[QUOTE=Exapno MapcaseRoches, Saying “It’s also strange that people register with a party” is like saying that marriage is religious. Neither is true in the U.S. but people tend to connect the two.
AFAIK, in all states you register to vote, period. However, in most states, if you want the privilege of voting in a primary election that determines candidates you must also state a party affiliation. It has no legal meaning whatsoever, but is a courtesy to make life easier for the two main parties. You can switch affiliation pretty much at any time before the election cutoff date.[/QUOTE]
In many states, such as Ohio and Michigan, there is absolutely no party registration. If you want to vote in a primary, you show up at the polling place and ask for a ballot. The catch is that you can ask for only one ballot, either Democratic or Republican (or Libertarian, etc.). You can choose whichever one you want and the next time you show up for a primary election, you can ask for a different one. The election workers will mark down which ballot you took and this is public information, but it places no restriction on you.