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Comment by CaliforniaKarl | Hacker News Reader

I disagree. I believe there are people who want results sooner rather than later. The greater the delay, the more annoyed folks become. Recording votes in _both_ paper and electronic form allows for the auditability of paper and the speed of electronic calculations.

(Side note: I also believe that hand-counting of ballots can be tedious, and humans performing tedious, repetitive tasks are prone to error. See [1].)

[1]: https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/hand...

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> I believe there are people who want results sooner rather than later

In Denmark all ballots are hand-counted. It takes about 6 hours from polls close to every precinct reporting a preliminary result. Wanting it faster isn't really necessary, other than to feed the 24/7 news machine.

There are a LOT of elections in the US. Where I live we have ~30 different things to vote on this election.

So the incentive to automate things are bigger here.

So does Denmark, why do you assume it's any different? Counting doesn't take that long when you split it across 10K voting districts, which is what the U.S. did for most of its existence. We want ACCURATE elections free from corruption and hacks. You can't undo a fucked up election.

I'm from Sweden where we only have 3 things to vote on (national, county, and city). I assumed Denmark was similar.

Europarlament too?

That's on a separate day.

Denmark has a smaller population than New York City, America is a very large place.

Italy has 60M people and paper ballots, results are out the next day. Population does not matter since polling stations can be scaled up proportionally.

I've been in voting where we had a dozen ballots per person (referendums) so this would be more than the total paper ballots in the US, it works fine.

Minor miscounts happen but nobody has ever seriously questioned the overall vote results.

Uh no. This election I had a president, two senators, a state senator, a state assembly, a county executive, city council, school board, prosecutor recall, and half a dozen ballot measures. It took four legal size paper surfaces.

Some of the regional elections in Germany have comically large ballots with dozens of options and a very complicated counting system (16 votes that can be split between individuals or party lists). The hand-counted results are generally available by the next morning. There is really no excuse for using electronic voting. In Germany it has been ruled unconstitutional since it cannot be checked by the voters.

Those could easily be prioritized. First count the federal elections, then the state elections, then the county elections. You get the presidential and congressional results within a day, the state election results within two-three days, and the more local ones within the week. Is anyone going to seriously complain that it took a week to find out who is on the school board?

Right, so there are more people to count the vote

Why should you compromise on security because you're impatient? Have the voter vote on paper; since it's only two candidates, this can be postcard-sized. Scan the postcards for the fast results, check and double check by hand (or visual if there's a picture taken by the scanner).

There were 22 different races to vote on in my ballot yesterday. Are you suggesting only hand count the presidential election then tally all the rest digitally?

This is so strange to me.. not complaining or criticising, just thanking you for the insight.

I would expect one ballot paper per vote (based on rare occasion of doing two at once) to ensure the count is simple and accurate.

They make the ballots different colours to ensure you put them in the correct boxes iirc

It wouldn't be a bad idea to break up federal, state and local elections into different ballots.

2 candidates for president, yes.

Plus US Senate, federal congressional district, state assembly, state Senate, 7 judges, and 6 paragraph-long ballot propositions.

Not only your postcard idea wouldn't work, manual counting 3 pages (!) of a giant ballot would get prone to errors and be expensive rather quickly.

I think the current electronic plus storing the paper ballot for future audit if needed offers the best of both worlds.

It isn't only two candidates. In my state we have 5 presidential candidates on the ballot along with 12 other local elections and ballot measures.

You can scan paper to make the count faster. The benefit of using paper is you can even use multiple scanners from different companies even.

Hand counts are actually not all that time-consuming for large groups. Voting districts are already broken down enough whete each polling station only has a few thousand ballots.

> The greater the delay, the more annoyed folks become.

Where's the problem with waiting? This is not some customer service to optimize for profit, there's no harm in waiting a bit.

You mean people that had to line up for hours can not wait a little longer for results?

Paper ballot have the advantage of being robust against e.g. power failures. They are also trivially to scale up - just need small secluded space for people to fill them and an additional pen - much shorter waiting lines. There is not BIOS, there is no software to be rolled out or computer to be procured, installed, secured and finally put in secure storage or securely disposed.

In my country we have paper ballots, but I have (quite seriously) never lined up for more than 20 minutes to vote!

Being a country with compulsory voting helps, because the system has to make it possible for everyone without a valid exceptional circumstance to be able to vote (would be unfair to be fined for not voting if you were still waiting in line to vote when the polls closed), and also they can quite accurately predict the kind of numbers they're going to get at the polling places.

People can want it fasted and people can become annoyed, but that's their choice. An election can be counted and verified only so quickly, it doesn't matter if people want it faster or not.

US election results take more time that every other paper ballot country so this is a lie

The US tends to combine rather than separate local, state, and federal elections, as well as not having a parliamentary system at either state or federal level (resulting in separate but often simultaneous legislative and executive elections, and in some states judicial as well), as well as having bicameralism at the federal level and most states (resulting in additional simultaneous legislative elections), as well as having initiative, recall, and/or referenda as significant functions in many states, as well as having non-unitary executives with multiple independently elected executive officers in many states as well as having many of those same state issues applying at the county and municipal levels as well (and, often, for overlapping additional special jurisdictions.)

As a result, there are a whole lot of separate elections conducted on the same ballot in the US, more than is typical elsewhere. This increases the tabulation load.

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