Not Doable?
Robert X. Cringley makes the case for Canada's system of voting:
Forget touch screens and electronic voting. In Canadian Federal elections, two barely-paid representatives of each party, known as "scrutineers," are present all day at the voting place. If there are more political parties, there are more scrutineers. To vote, you write an "X" with a pencil in a one centimeter circle beside the candidate's name, fold the ballot up and stuff it into a box. Later, the scrutineers AND ANY VOTER WHO WANTS TO WATCH all sit at a table for about half an hour and count every ballot, keeping a tally for each candidate. If the counts agree at the end of the process, the results are phoned-in and everyone goes home. If they don't, you do it again. Fairness is achieved by balanced self-interest, not by technology. The population of Canada is about the same as California, so the elections are of comparable scale. In the last Canadian Federal election the entire vote was counted in four hours. Why does it take us 30 days or more?
I've argued this before. Since never having voted in the United States with their systems (yeah, plural) and being Canadian makes me a bit biased...well, you get the idea. Ben Adida responds, saying that the ballot in America is too complicated for the Canadian system to work in America (emphasis added):
We vote for more positions (sometimes as many as 50 or more), and we vote for propositions. The complexity of the US ballot means that hand-counting paper ballots is simply not doable given the timeframe that is expected for same-day results. You'll hear this from almost all election officials: hand-counting paper ballots just can't be done.
See also:
- Transparency over speed
- A Better Control (last item)
