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Comment by jacques_chester | Hacker News Reader

I have to admit that I dislike the Maine ballot design. I think the "number each box" approach is simpler and less error-prone.

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At first I did too, but then I thought about peoples handwriting and how it might be very hard to read the numbers. Then imagine a political fight over how many 1s are actually 7s?

Australia has done this for a century. It's not that hard. You have official counters and each candidate can appoint scrutineers to observe the count[0]. Scrutineers can challenge how a ballot has been counted: "I think that's actually a 7, not a 1". If the count supervisor agrees, it's changed. If not, then not. If it's ruled impossible to distinguish, the ballot is considered informal and removed from the count entirely.

[0] https://www.abc.net.au/cm/rimage/7570634-3x2-xlarge.jpg?v=6

Maine has "verifiable" machine counting with hand counting as a backup IIUC. Add that to some of the in state standardized tests and bubbling your answer should be very familiar to people.

Sure, but writing numbers is familiar to people as well.

It keeps the process consistent with filling out the rest of a ballot. Just fill in the little oval with your preference. It lets us use the same tabulation machines also, I presume.

They can be counted by hand. And they should be.

They are counted by machine, but there are provisions for counting by hand in cases of discrepancies. Maine towns (usually small ones) can still count the ballots by hand if they choose.

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