Comments on: If it ain’t broke

By: dondi

dondi — Tue, 09 Dec 2003 00:57:39 +0000

My own feeling – based purely on the anecdotal evidence of working as an election judge in an election that was partially electronically counted and partially hand counted – is that electronic systems are almost certainly more reliable. The possibilities of accidentally pulling two ballots instead of one (and thus missing a vote), or mistakenly viewing a stack of ballots as already counted, are great enough in hand counting that I have more faith in an electronic system. It is also clear that hand counting of a full U.S. ballot (with all of the different offices, ballot measures, etc.) would require a substantial time investment on the part of official counters. Assuming that official counters are paid employees (even though they are typically not well-paid), there would be substantially higher day-of-election expenses associated with hand-counting (although whether those costs increase enough to justify the use of moderately expensive voting systems could still require analysis) Thus, I would slightly revise the answer to the first of Maria’s questions to “Unsure, but probably so”. Of course, that still leaves the problems tied to her second two questions, for which I would not quibble with her “maybe” and “diddly squat” answers. Just to provide a point of comparison – in my experience in the State of Minnesota, the polls had to be staffed by a mix of people from each party. When we did the hand counting of ballots – one representative of each party sat next to each other, and counted the ballots together. This sounds like it may be slightly more costly than the Irish model (there are 2 official counters on the time clock – rather than just one overseen by volunteers from the parties), but should yield results of comparable reliability. Finally, the question of how many hand counts were actually done, let alone should have been done, is fraught with some contention. However, dete is slightly incorrect – hand counts were not done in general across Florida (I believe that they were only conducted in three counties, and at least one of the three (Dade) did not complete the hand recount. I am not certain, but I seem to recall that in Dade county, none of the hand recount was included in the final official totals, since the Secretary of State would not allow a partial update.)

By: dete

dete — Mon, 08 Dec 2003 20:55:51 +0000

I had this exact discussion with a co-worker just the other day. I was talking about how it should be relatively easy to build a system with a paper trail, etc. and he asked me why we should go electronic at all. I’ll admit I was stumped. In Canada, all counting is done by volunteers (the theory being that any party with a non-trivial percentage of the vote can certainly muster up a volunteer or two for each electoral district). So electronic voting only adds cost (the only potential argument I can see). Frankly, I don’t think that there is a good answer to your question. I think that—like myself before talking with my friend—folks just assume that it has to go electronic just like everything else. No one thinks to question why. Just imagine if Florida didn’t have any electronic voting equipment; we wouldn’t have had the butterfly ballot contoroversy or the chad controversy. And nothing was saved since they had to do hand counts in the end anyway. You can pry my laptop from my cold, dead hands, but I think putting an X on a piece of paper next to my preferred candidate’s name is a fine way to choose government.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Mon, 08 Dec 2003 19:39:43 +0000

Ashcroft?