This means anything more complex than a pen or a stamp on an approved paper is too complex.
It's 100% paper PRSTV & so the counts are slow. Not only is this generally OK (because getting a rapid result is absolutely not a requirement of any well-functioning voting system) but it also has actual benefits.
The main benefit is predicated on the count being engaging in and of itself. Other countries put a lot of effort into jazzing up statistical presentations on constituency predictions, cloropleths aplenty, to engage viewers. In Ireland, count centres are not only manned by trained count staff, they're also flooded with volunteer tallymen who verify the counting in realtime. Count coverage is on the ground, showing a real physical process that's intricate enough to be watchable. The entire process also serves as an education-through-doing in how our voting system works, so you get a more engaged & informed electorate (when it comes to the mechanics of voting - still unfortunately not that informed on policy, that's a worldwide problem).
In practice it doesn't seem to matter that much. The counters even out the first-level effects of this, so it only matters for votes that have been transferred more than once; it can be determined statistically that it changes the result only in a very small number of cases; and there are plenty of other weird threshold effects to care about instead. But it's one property you might expect of a fair voting system that Ireland doesn't give you.
That said, surplus distribution tends to be the main flaw raised time & time again, & whenever improvements are discussed the general conclusion tends to be that the current distribution mechanism goes a very long way toward fair representation of the actual preference distribution. It's notable that the more computationally intensive alternatives to get "fairer" outcomes are pretty recent inventions & it's really hard to justify the effort given the tiny number of cases affected.
Besides that what other scaling problems are there?
Coming from Ireland (tiny population, low pop density) I've heard this argument countless times (we're an obvious target for this critique), but I still to this day don't see the logic of it. At all.
Constituencies are sized per capita, count centres are staffed per capita, if you have higher pop-density you'll either have more observers at count centres, or the same number at more count centres. This is a distributed system - it's the definition of scalable.
Fwiw the last count I tallied at (Dublin MEP) had an electorate of 890k. It was the smallest constituency in Ireland in that election, but still bigger than the largest congressional district electorate in the US. We counted in one large open warehouse. There were 23 candidates & 19 separate repeating counts.
That could work in favour or against your argument - I don't really know - I don't really think it matters either direction though.
I don't quite understand how a country with a mere 5 times more population is unable to enact the same solution at their 'so much bigger' scale.
And France is spread over more time zone than the U.S., so that argument doesn't work either.
Many countries have secret ballots, mine doesn't, for reasons which are extremely sketchy (and presumably why my country is blue, not dark blue like New Zealand on the democracy map)
- Secrecy of who voted for whom
- Transparency of everything else. The names of everybody in the process, the process itself and all the statistics should be verifiably public.
Being an observer to your polling station must be a guaranteed voter right. Similarly all participating parties must have the right to send representatives to observe the entire process.
Before opening the polling station all ballots are counted by multiple observers from all sides. This is recorded into files / documentation of each observer. So the number of possible ballot papers that can be voted on is documented.
Then each ballot paper needs to be stamped with a official local seal. This is also observed by every observer. The number of stamped ballots is also counted and documented. The number has to match the original ones.
The number of people who can vote in that voting station is determined by a population survey. In bigger cities each region must have roughly the same number of constituents.
The number of ballots that are stamped must match the number of eligible voters in the polling station. A voter can request to change a damaged ballot paper. The replacement should be done in front of all observers and the voter. The replaced ballot is destroyed in front of everyone.
After putting their ballot into the box, the voter has to sign their name in multiple printouts of the list of eligible voters of that polling station. These printouts of the lists are held by observers from multiple sides. The number of signatures has to match the number of ballots in the box.
Everybody can observe the count. All the numbers are checked against each other.
If you think that this is infeasible, I come from a country of 80 million people and live in a similarly sized one. Both of them use the same system. It works. It scales since it is an almost trivially parallelizable problem. We get the election results in the same day of voting.
First the box is in front of everybody. Second, before allowing people to throw votes in, you seal the box with an tamper evident seal. Usually pouring beeswax over a string works. You can have multiple seals for all sides.
Having a mark anywhere else but the box you cross / stamp invalidates the ballot. You put ballots in envelopes. Each envelope must have a single ballot inside.
A voter can replace the ballot if they made a mistake. They need to destroy their ballot in front of everyone.
Is there any way to prevent the observers from knowing who votes? I could see a scenario where a party chooses observers that are likely to intimidate potential voters (e.g. KKK members in a majority black polling station).
If the police does not uphold the laws that guarantee just elections, if they allow intimidations or treat citizens differently, or if the military tries to influence election results, then you do not have a democracy.
If those people still feel unsafe, they are not living in a democracy but under an authoritarian regime. You cannot really have a non-violent, fair democracy under such regime. Democracy isn't just elections. It is creation of bunch of non-elected institutions that guarantee the fairness of the elected stuff. Judicial branch, expert organizations and regulators are all part of it. This has to come from realization that the alternative is violence. Sometimes needed violence. Most resilient democracies in the world like France are direct results of multiple violent events happened because institutions were not capable of striking the balance. Suppressing large swaths of people is just a powder keg. In true democracies, people from all views should have a good mutual understanding that alternative governance systems exist and may even be viable or more stable, but they will be murdering each other and they themselves will eventually be victims to the violence too.
My point: reality is messy and simplicity isn't a guarantee of reliability. The things hat really work in our societies are pragmatic, not simple.
Now try explaining any kind of encryption system that gives the same level of confidence to a high-scholer or even CS students in as many words as I used in that comment.
It reminds me of a youtube channel explaining the Visa/Mastercard duopoly using monkeys and bananas. It doesn't perfectly fit, but works surprisingly well for such a subject.