Why can’t we just count votes by hand? To me this is over optimization and really just helps a special interest group who wants to sell apps and voting machines. It’s not like we pay a lot of money for election volunteers.
EDIT: And if someone wants to fill out a paper ballot manually, let them. Just have a few spares around, most people won't.
Big friendly, easy to use touch screen, it then prints your ballot on paper, in big friendly easy to read lettering. You then feed that into another machine. There's the e-voting, as well as paper ballot paper trail.
Because Iowa chose to have a caucus, not a primary.
If you’re not an Iowa voter, there are a million political bikesheds that would have more relevance to your life. You’re basically just complaining about the pace of a television program.
That being said, it is an excellent way to exclude people who have other responsibilities or difficulty making it out for several hours on a week night.
Make a nice formatted layout specific to that year. People feel pretty comfortable in excel-like spreadsheets/forms.
Then at the state level, since you have permission to all the sheets, its simple to aggregates all the sheet data
It's not some wiz-bang branded app with fancy animations, but its piggybacking on a very robust spreadsheet system that many people have some experience/intuition with.
Early reports on the radio mentioned that people trying to call in and relay the results were waiting ages on hold, but they also said that the reason phones were so heavily used was that the app was giving inconsistent results. I never heard any more about what that could mean exactly.
Many of the caucus sites don't have good enough cell reception to download an app at the last minute. Imagine yourself arriving at a location with poor cell reception, told to download someone else's unknown code onto your personal phone using a weak or nonexistent cellular data signal. Problematic to say the least. Finally, the next day the Internet calls you "old people" as a final slap in the face.
I guess that’s the part I don’t understand very well. Does that mean the number of delegates didn’t match what the math said they should based on the final voting counts? Or does it mean some of the folks who used the app to report the counts also called in with different numbers? Or something else?
As of last night, that was unclear. I’m hoping that they do a whole post-mortem on what went wrong and how they resolved it.
I'd don't know whether it's hard inconsistencies (e.g., delegate counts not right given second alignment totals) or just improbable combinations that call for manual review out of caution (e.g., second alignment numbers that are technically possible but improbable given the first alignment) or a mix.
It was.
> My guess is that the round-to-round numbers didn't match expectations, and my guess-the-second is that more people leave between rounds than we realized.
They diagnosed the problem to the reporting functionality in the app not including all data in all reports, not unexpected results in the actual logged data.
Election results are too important to risk compromising them by trying to save money or rush results.
The money saved is always marginal anyway and the extra time is usually only a few hours.
This is a solved problem. In my precinct in Virginia, any mark inside the bubble counts as valid. If you accidentally put a stray mark in one selection and intentionally fill in another for a single-choice contest, the scanner machine will reject your ballot and notify the poll worker about your overvote. If you marked outside the bubble, the machine will reject your ballot as an undervote.
Automation and digitalization of the voting process bring little advantage (speed) to a process where publicity, transparency, accountability need to happen slowly and to consolidate slowly, for the partial & full results to be trusted.
The ballots are also kept and can be verified by the voters after the fact.
No state in America has any excuse for running an election less effectively than Sunderland.
Each of these is a different piece of paper, but on any given Election Day it’s rare (but not unheard of) to see three at once.
That's true at the level of national government, but there are separate elections for different levels of government.
It's as if in the US you voted just for the House of Representatives, the Senate was unelected (which, get, historically it was) and the House elected the President.
Instead, the US started out with the same thing, except we elect an entire separate body (because we still didn't trust the people to do that, plus we wanted to make sure that citizens of slave states were overrepresented in executive elections as well as in the Senate) just to elect the President, and then later we decided to make the Senate accountable directly to the state electorate, too.
Putting numbers 1-5 in boxes isn't intuitive?
And yes, I am aware this system is already used in many places.
Humans cannot trust what they cannot understand and cannot verify.
A paper-based voting procedure, and counting procedure provide these guarantees: understanding and verification, through real-time, peer-based counting & review.
Any other automatic system cannot bring, at this point, the same guarantees, where you have to trust: 1) the people/system that built the system, 2) the process they used that ensures against any wrong-doing.
It is low-tech. And that's a good thing. No high-tech alternative provides the same value & the same guarantees at the same time.
It works well, is hard to cheat, and there's no money in it?
What's that old Ben Franklin quote, three people can keep a secret but only if two of them are dead?
The only real argument against it is that you have to pay people to pay by hand, but I sincerely doubt that amount of manual labor costs more than an app.
That's how the president, the parlament, and the local governments are elected in Lithuania, a country of the size of Iowa. It takes 10 minutes to set up a new private limited company online, but all votes in the elections are still counted by hand.
“Tabulate” here isn't a synonym for “count”, its recording/aggregating/communicating counts made outside the system.
And, of course, graph paper doesn't address the need to rapidly aggregate the numbers, either physically (in space) or analytically (to get totals). Or to reconcile them for inconsistencies between the three dimensions. (Which is the whole point of the new reporting requirements imposed on the IDP, and, according to the IDP, the actual source of delays.)
And, of course, using #2 pencil for the records has its own problems as far as security goes.
This app was simply to aggregate the results more quickly than hundreds of phone calls. It was just a cheap app that was inadequately tested.
It's a bummer but hardly a crisis for democracy, and not really relevant to discussions of technology for vote counting in primaries or general elections.
You could keep the computers but you also have the papers sealed in boxes. Then you can manually check 1-5% of the votes and make sure the machines are correct. Or if someone contests the count and a judge decides the reasons are fair you can count again all the votes in that polling station.
UNIVAC famously analyzed the 1952 presidential election. Today we've got about twice as many voters, so maybe get a computer twice as powerful as a UNIVAC.
While it's enough for cars, for example, to get approval from some trusted authority, we can see in this thread how that's not enough for elections: recent US elections are somewhat trustworthy, from what I can tell[0]. Yet a significant number of people don't trust them. While scepticism can be useful to keep the process honest, it comes with a price: lack of trust gives license, for example, for people to ignore election results by questioning their legitimacy. People drop out of the democratic process, feel less bound by law, and start skirting civil responsibilities, from paying taxes to jury duty. Lacking trust in the potential for "peaceful revolution" at the next election, they seek other means of representation, up to and including extremism and violence.
To add another European example: Germany has a polling place just about every block, at least in cities. In 10+ elections, I have never waited in line more than five minutes. After polling closes at 6pm, you can stick around/come back and observe the counting. The times where I did so, there were maybe ten other people also observing, and we were free to walk around and get as close as we wanted. With a polling place serving just a few hundred people, you can watch and independently count the votes of at least one party. Later that night, you can compare your count with the number on the published spreadsheet.
That's only one party's votes, in one of tens of thousands of polling places. But get a few trusted friends, or do it repeatedly over the years, and you rather rapidly get statistically significant evidence.
The only difficulty for the US would be the insane amount of individual votes, from ballot initiatives to dog catcher (not any longer, I know; but similar).
[0]: Apart from the well-known and completely legal top-down methods of election tampering, such as holding it on a workday, cutting down on polling places in specific locations to increase commute and waiting times etc.
In Europe, as I understand it, you vote for a single person and that person does the rest of the voting for your area. I'm sorry if I am wrong about that or oversimplified it; that's the current state of my knowledge on the subject.
Just so you know: America started out that way too, which is why we have the 'house of representatives'. The framers of the constitution intended that congressional districts never exceed 50K to 60K thousand. Unfortunately the average congressional district in America is currently about 700K.
Voting for someone to represent me and my closest 699,999 friends is barely a vote at all. With congressional districts that large (not to mention fcking gerrymandering) you are not really voting along with your peers. People are grouped together in strange ways.
Also, Germany is 1/4th the size of the US and the UK is 1/5th the size of the US.
The net result is; Americans are not accurately represented at a national level.
When you combine that with the fact that we pride ourselves on our independence and individuality; taking away our ability* to cast votes on local issues is probably not going to fly. If anything I'm guessing we'd want more power to vote individually. Two of the last five presidents who were elected were not chosen by the majority of the population.
I think a simpler solution like paper ballots and many polling places might help, but, the sheer manpower to make sure that goes well would be a massive undertaking. As I said, many multiples larger than in some European countries.
Having an explainable (to your point) system that is open and exhaustively tested is one path to avoid the current mess we find ourselves in.