Comment by ChrisLomont | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ChrisLomont | Hacker News Reader

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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.

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