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Comment by oneplane | Hacker News Reader

That is how voting with electronics should be. It's great for entertainment/news etc to get early results but ultimately it doesn't matter if it takes a day or two with analog counting. Same day results really don't help with anything.

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The French presidential election got results within hours of closings, as does Germany in every election cycle. Without voring machines. How? Tons of ballot stations that count individually. Those preliminary results are recounted before it is official, usually without any deviations.

I agree so, that if a system isn't set up that way, early results should not be important.

As someone who’s done this before, it relies on tons of manual volunteer labor. You need around 0.75-1.25% of the population counting votes + the people running the polls.

The way French elections are run is insanely elegant though, it’s basically perfect from a security/transparency l POV.

But isn’t there something poeticly sound about this? It’s kind like “the family that eats together stays together” and other platitudes like that. A nation that requires a heavy involvement in the whole process is going to value it more. In the states, we worship money and automation, so we automate it true point where very few are involved. And then we’re surprised when “win at all cost” incidents start to rise over “determine the public will.”

It almost guarantees that the electorate won’t be consulted often, though. That’s something you can afford to do every 4 years, but not every 6 months.

I don’t know. Switzerland works the same way and they have votes more often than every 6 months. (Also the average German will vote more often than just every 4 years due to European, national, state-level and regional elections.)

In France it is done four times in a row every five years (presidential + parliament) and also two times in a row every six years (municipal elections, a few places have two simultaneous elections for the city mayor and "associated city" mayor) and I think once every five years (European elections, not sure of the modalities in France as I was never in France at this time).

It has a cost but most people involved are not paid. Referendums are uncommon but that has more to do with political culture than costs I think.

I just checked, France has 70000 polling stations and 280000 volunteers for each election, so it’s rather 0.4% of the population.

We just had presidential elections and are electing representatives for parlement next week, we had local elections in 2020, nation-wide elections are not that rare.

Similar to Australia. We have mandatory voting, with paid staff, most being hired just before elections, and from my experience working there, it is well organised, with plenty of redundancy, in case of challenges and recounts.

I love the mandatory voting. Back the day I barely ever voted, that did change. Mainly because I saw political parties rise that I fundamentaly disagree with, meaning that the outcome all of a sudden actually did make a difference for me.

Having mandatory voting would mean that non votes don't screw up the results when one side manages to mobilize morw voters than others. And intentionally voting blank actually sends a pretty strong signal.

Yeah the volunteers you’re talking about here are the all-day (7am to 9-10pm!) volunteers, not the counting people who come for just the evening the day of the vote. They outnumber volunteers by a factor of 3-5 where I am.

And yet they do it, not every 6 months, but regularly. There are presidential elections (2 rounds every 5 years), general elections for the parliament (2 rounds every 5 years), elections for local (2 rounds every 6 years), department (2 rounds every 4 years), and regional councils (2 rounds every 6 years), and European elections (1 round every 5 years). Plus the occasional referendum. This year there will have been 4 voting days.

Sure, they don’t vote for judges and sheriffs and stuff, and it’s a system that’s more representative than participative as in, say, Switzerland. But it works.

One of the things that helps is that voting happens always on Sundays, when most people do not have to take a day off work to vote or to help counting.

It's a lot easier when you have:

- substantial social services that don't directly require individuals to have disposable income and aren't tied directly to employment

- humane policies for vacation days in general, and

- national holidays for things like election day.

In the USA, we teach our children that civic engagement is important, but then corrupt politicians at all levels make civic engagement as hard as possible, abetted by moralizing reactionary conservatives.

No wonder Americans are generally cynical and don't participate in politics.

The UK pays its vote counters, and other people who assist at elections (such as the poll clerks who check names off the electoral roll and issue ballot papers). Sunderland South, which takes pride in being the first constituency to return its result each year- aiming to do so within two hours of polls closing- uses bank tellers to count the votes.

Pay rates vary by locality (as elections are run by local councils)- typically it seems to be around £200 for the day.

The printed paper "ballot" may not be what the voter intended.

There are multiple stories of electronic voting machines changing the vote on the screen. The voter corrects it, and the correct ballot is printed. But, if the voter misses the change, then an incorrect ballot is printed. Sometimes, the voter has to correct it more than once.

Here in New Hampshire, we use paper ballots marked with a felt tip pen. They are scanned with an optical reader, but it's straightforward to do a manual recount of the official paper ballots.

Electronic balloting machines are an invitation to programmatic fraud.

I attended a Free Software Foundation annual meeting some years ago. The assembled group was asked whether they preferred electronic voting systems over paper ballots. Not a single hand went up.

This is why designs usually require the voter to be able to inspect the paper ballot before finalizing it. Shenanigans like that would be caught, as the machine has no way of knowing how close the voter will look.

In yesterday’s California election (Los Angeles County, specifically), it had me review all of my choices on the screen (after I was done), then it printed out the form so I could review the printed copy. Then (very confusingly) the final step was to insert the form back into the machine. Basically everyone was confused by this review and reinsert process, but still it seemed like a good system for ensuring there are no glitches.

You could also just replace all that with a paper ballot.

I have had arguments with disability activists about this- apparently, some interpretations of American disability rights legislation require electronic devices to be made available to allow voters whose disability prevents them using a pen to mark their ballot unassisted.

I had a paper ballot print out under plastic after I made my in person vote in california. you have to agree that everything matches up with what you actually voted for. the times that the "system messes up and the voter has to change it" it's almost always either user error or the touch screen being calibrated incorrectly.

The most common cause of mis-vote is operator error. I've watched people use the touchscreen devices; with so many voters both unfamiliar with the mechanics of a touchscreen and unsteady on their feet (the median voter age is about 50), and with the machines made of cheap plastic resting on a table, they grip the machine to stabilize it and themselves. Their gripping thumb rests on the screen and creates phantom signal that makes it hard to localize the touch coordinate.

This is the best argument I'm familiar with against the electronic machines we used to use, and our state switched to paper oval-fill ballots that are then electronically tabulated. But, I haven't seen the statistics yet on how many mis-counts we now have as a result relative to the old system and I'd be curious to see them... Ask yourself how confident you are that 100% of voters know how to successfully fully darken the oval. And since the system is anonymous, nobody looks over their shoulder to verify they understand how to do it before the vote is dropped in the box (though in the event of a close race, a manual recount will be automatically triggered and at that point, at least it'll be human eyes deciding whether the voter circling the oval indicates their intent to vote for that candidate).

In the UK we count ballots manually. We have 90%+ of results overnight.

There is even a race between a few constituencies to be the first to officially declare a result. These guys are really well organised, and for a few days it is a huge piece of civic pride.

With the results announced by a line up of all the candidates, almost always 2 or 3 mainstream candidates surrounded by candidates in clown or animal costumes…

It doesn't matter until the incumbent uses that delay to his advantage by declaring themselves the winner and trying to lead their followers into believing votes counted after that declaration are fraudulent.

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