Hacker News Reader

Comment by ChrisLomont | Hacker News Reader

Conversely, hand filled out ballots are a mess, often illegible, the hanging chad fiasco, etc. With electronic voting, the voter can (should?) see on a screen exactly what they did, and the machine can make multiple exact copies in electronic and paper formats of that exact result. There is far less ambiguity in the physical record once this has been done.

View on HN

The UK has paper-only ballots and none of this stuff is a problem. (There are no "hanging chads" because ballots are marked by the voter with a pen or pencil on a piece of paper). The polls close at 10pm, the votes are counted overnight by volunteers, and the winner takes office the next morning. It always baffles me that the US system is so complicated.

You're telling me out of millions of ballots, none of the pen or pencil markings could be unclear?

The reality is, there are always ballots that fall in a grey area. That's being exploited to sow doubt in the uncertainty of an entire election.

Hell, same thing happened during Brexit:

> The first stage will see all ballot papers - though not actual votes - counted, a process known as verification.

> Any ballots which are later rejected are included in these verified ballots.

I submit it COULD happen there, too. Votes being counted by local authorities, making judgement calls, and the plan being to announce the preliminary results if the election is "clear" that night.

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-eu-referendum-36044026

Canadian here, and yes, it's basically impossible to mark your ballot wrong for a commonwealth parliamentary election for the simple reason you only vote for a single thing: who should be member of parliament for your riding.

Since there is only a single question there is tons of whitespace between options and you can't accidentally mark selections for one question in the space asking a different one.

I've never had to vote in a referendum like brexit, but it wouldn't surprise me to learn the ballot was more complex that the usual parliamentary election one. Looking at images of the brexit ballot it appears pretty similar to what I'm used to, but with far less white space between options.

> You're telling me out of millions of ballots, none of the pen or pencil markings could be unclear?

I didn't say any such thing. Of course there are disputed and spoiled ballots, and these are resolved quickly by the volunteers and local observers from the parties taking part in the election. Unless the number of disputed ballots exceeds the difference it's not really a problem. Recounts happen, especially where there's only a few hundred votes in it.

Spoiled ballots (where the voters are actively protesting by scrawling "I hate them all!", or some other message across the paper) are tallied separately, but are otherwise ignored when calculating the election outcome.

I've participated as ballot counter in provincial elections (British Columbia) where an 'X' or check mark were valid ways to make a choice on a ballot. It was a very long time ago however my recollection was that the mark was to be on or in the box beside the candidate name. Ballots were excluded but they were exceedingly rare and always in consultation with supervisors. (completely missed the box)

I did it for municipal elections in Quebec (which follows the provincial rules) and the big important thing to note is that people voted for two things, mayor and councillor, and received two separate ballots on different papers.

There’s also the fact that the ballot is white text on black with a white circle to fill in. This design decision is ingenious in how it eliminates doubts about voting.

Here's the UK rules on spoilt ballots [1]. Here's [2] an article showing that such removed ballots sometimes get a larger share than a candidate, and that the rate is larger than the close state elections the US just had. Here's [3] some UK elections where 2.9% of all ballots were discarded because they were filled out wrong.

So I don't think the UK evidence shows what you claim it does. The smallest UK spoilt ballot error I can find is larger than the winning margins in many US places.

Finally, here's [4] one analysis of voting tech versus ballot spoilage rates that seems to reach similar conclusions of all the papers I scanned over. Hand edited paper is about the worst way to get valid ballots of any method in this study.

[1] https://www.votenone.org.uk/spoilt-ballot-results-2015.html

[2] https://www.votenone.org.uk/spoilt-ballot-results-2015.html

[3] https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2012/nov/19/spoilt-ballots-pc...

[4] https://www.hamilton.edu/news/florida/Klinkner%20Analysis.pd...

All of those spoilt ballot examples are where the proportion of spoiled ballots is high because voters are protesting. They don’t combat the claim that inadvertently spoiled ballots are rare, nor that spoiled ballots open to the possibility of fraud.

So you're claiming that the Florida study doesn't measure spoilt ballots by technology, despite them specifically stating how they normalized for errors? You're basically calling them liars. Have a citation showing your evidence to make such a claim?

Or maybe you didn't read the study....

My apologies regarding the Florida study; I only intended to address the references you had to UK ballots, given the context of this thread.

On the Florida study. Perhaps I've misunderstood, but it read to me like the punchcard system was worst, followed by ballots scanned by a computer at the precinct, then "other", which is the two counties using other system that sound quite different to each other. It wasn't clear to me at all that they had any sort of rating of how many inadvertently spoiled ballots came from hand written, hand counted systems vs others. I'll readily admit that I'm not any kind of statistics expert though, so the study wasn't straightforward for me to follow.

The trick is that American ballots bombard their voters with dozens of questions and dozens of options. Judges, ballot initiatives, various functionaries, etc, which makes hand counted paper ballots impractical.

In parliamentary systems, you elect people so they can vote on those matters for you.

> In parliamentary systems, you elect people so they can vote on those matters for you.

Same in America too. Hence, representative democracy. It’s why we have Congress: to vote for us. The problem is that the citizens feel left out in certain issues, so instead of replacing the politician, they make propositions a thing. Boom! Now you have 5+ more things to vote for. Add in county and local governments, and it gets to be 20+ things long.

The solution to this (also one which is used in the UK) is to put these other votes on different pieces of paper. That way you can count the presidential election first and leave the local initiatives to a bit later, or however you'd prefer to prioritize the results.

> There are no "hanging chads" because ballots are marked by the voter with a pen or pencil on a piece of paper

This is how it is done in many US jurisdictions as well (including all the ones I have voted in).

It's definitely unnecessarily complicated, and the hanging chad problem simply stems from elections where making such a claim can win the whole election for your candidate.

There are not literal hanging chads but you can still have problems, such as marks in multiple boxes when only one choice is permitted, or marks outside the designated boxes.

I agree that if the electronic voting machine is just helping you print out an easily legible copy of your ballot, which you then verify for correctness and take to another machine to have it scanned for counting, that's a good thing, for the reasons you give. Not only does it help with auditability since the physical record is more standardized, it also probably reduces the error rate of automated counting.

What I'm not sure about is whether that is actually the way it is done for all electronic voting machines.

It is the way it is done for all Dominion voting machines, which replaced Diebold AccuVote machines (which did not leave a paper trail) in Georgia in 2019.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com