Election Tech: In Canada, They Actually Count the Votes 500
Presto Vivace writes with this outline of what voting can look like while remaining countable and anonymous — and how it does look north of the U.S. border. "In Canada, they use hand-marked paper ballots, hand counted in public. Among other things, that process means that we can actually be sure who won. And if the elections of 2000 and 2008 are any guide, and the race stays as close as the pollsters sat it is, we might, on Wednesday, November 7, not be sure who won."
Any Canadians among our readers who want to comment on this?"
I'm Canadian (Score:5, Insightful)
It gives the little old men and ladies a nice part time job for a while, and good times are had by all. I used to think that computer voting would be better but now that I've seen it in action, I'm glad we stuck to hand counting. Also it's fun watching the result get tallied, it's not instant so there is some buildup/drama.
Voting as entertainment and job market. :)
Re:not necessary (Score:3, Insightful)
So, you're saying that faith in statistics is better than knowing for sure with an actual count?
FYI: You can use more than one person to count the votes.
Re:10x the population (Score:5, Insightful)
There is no reason the system could not scale. Since counts happen at polling station, providing you have enough of them in any district it would not matter whether the population was 30 million, 300 million or a billion.
Re:not necessary (Score:2, Insightful)
Looking for obvious statistical anomalies only works if the person faking the data doesn't understand statistics.
And in Australia... (Score:4, Insightful)
In Australia, for most purposes we still use paper ballots. (There are a few exceptions - ACT territory elections have *optional* computer-based voting, and NSW state elections have an *optional* online voting system for some absentee or disabled voters.)
On election night, officials at every polling place - who are required to sign a declaration, under penalty, that they are not politically active - do an initial hand count of first-preference votes (yes, we have IRV and STV ballots here) and the votes for the top two front runners. These are the numbers that make their way to the internet in a matter of minutes and are used for the election night media coverage - but they actually have no legal significance at all, they're basically purely for the media coverage.
The real counting happens the week after election day, when all ballots are transported to the local electoral office for counting. For elections that use IRV ballots (e.g. the federal House of Representatives), the ballots are all hand counted. For STV ballots (e.g. the federal Senate), they do use computer based counting, however the paper ballots are retained and a hand count can be done if necessary. If there are any issues that arise, the Returning Officer has the discretion to order a recount as necessary, without necessarily needing court orders or anything like that.
The *entire process* - opening the polls, conducting the polling, closing the polls, the first count, the second count, and any recounts - takes place in front of candidate-appointed scrutineers (not quite as good as being public, but it's close enough). Every candidate can appoint scrutineers to witness the whole process and make objections.
And this is how Australia has elections that are virtually unchallengeable - for a typical federal election, there will usually be at most one serious dispute, and only in districts with the tiniest of margins where they need a judge to make the final decision. Heck, we're experimenting with computer-based and internet-based voting systems, and no-one's raising concerns because the Electoral Commission has such a high reputation for integrity and accuracy.
Re:I'm Canadian (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:10x the population (Score:5, Insightful)
Vote counting is the least of the USA's problems (Score:5, Insightful)
Of all the things Canadians can mock about U.S. elections, your difficulty in counting up the votes isn't even the top of the list. The most mind-boggling thing is that your election campaigns take most of a year, ensuring that for about 20% of the election cycle, any given politician (including the president) is basically unable to engage in their actual job of governing the country and is instead campaigning. In Canada, election campaigns typically last about six weeks; before the election is officially called, campaigning is prohibited. The result is that politicians can spend vastly more time doing their jobs and campaigns cost vastly less money.
Oh, and don't get me started on how incredibly bad an idea it is to have elected judges, prosecutors, sheriffs, etc. Here (Ontario) I think there are only five officials we actually vote for: representatives in federal and provincial legislatures, city councilor, mayor, and school board trustee. Everyone else is appointed, usually de facto by committee.
Re:How many votes are they counting? (Score:4, Insightful)
The technique being used is wrong. High speed manual counting doesn't need optical machines, it needs a separate ballot page for each vote item ie president, mayor etc. Those ballots get seperated at the polling station when they are placed into the sealed ballot boxes.
Once counting starts, two people take a box, dump it out and seperate the ballots into piles, one for each candidate. You use two so that nobody can cheat. Then you count the piles. That's the basic methodology.
South Africa takes it further, we validate that the ballot has been stamped by the IEC, the elections body, and have party representatives involved in the verification. Our last national election had 17,919,966 ballots cast, 239,237 marked as spoiled and we counted in under a day and ran live TV broadcasts following the results.
The practice of putting many choices on single forms complicates the counting to the point you need optical machines to count it for you, and that is bad.
All that is needed is a simple ballot and polling stations spread with a suitable density, normally 6000-8000 voters.
Re:Politicians are actually allowed to govern (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm sorry, but that is an oversimplification of the system. We also have an appointed senate, for which the governing party appoints their representatives to seats made vacant during their reign. And, there is the massively disproportionate representation of seats for Central and Eastern Canada.
There is a lot of misunderstanding about the later. I'm old enough to remember the Meech Lake Accord that the politicians tried to ram down our throats. A guaranteed minimum of 25% representation in parliament for Quebec regardless of their population (hyperbole to make the point: 1 person could hold 25% control of the country). During that time a seasoned politician called me to garner my support. When I pointed out that 25% of the house was 50% of a majority and (since they traditionally vote as a block) effectively all but guaranteed control of the country, she wasn't able to follow the math.
Luckily, we had a referendum, the people demonstrated they were smarter than their representatives, and the accord was struck down.
I love this country (although that has been tested as of late), and I think there's a lot of good in it. But, we have a lot of work to do on ensuring equal representation, and a fair sharing of moneys and resources (yep, I'm from the west and I said it) among the people of the country. Not just the old school elite and the extortionists.
Call this post a flame or whatever you want, I stand by my truth.
Re:Perfect (Score:5, Insightful)
Well in Canada we do factor in error. It's called spoiled ballots. And the election is not a statistical analysis of the votes of the population, it is the actual votes. There is no margin of error. You mark your ballot with an X in the proper bubble, which is beside the name and party of the candidate. It's nice and big and so is the name of the person. There are many signs at the polling station that tell you how to vote in very easy to understand pictures and the people running the polling station can easily tell you how to do it without referring to any candidate. If you mess that up, your vote doesn't count.
Margin of error puts the onus on the system. For an election to work the system must be held to a standard of infallibility and that all errors fall on the voter, if it's found not to be the case and is significant to have possibly affected the outcome a re-election is called.
So the margin of error is factored in, but more is taken into consideration than a mathematical equation.
Re:accuracy vs precision (Score:5, Insightful)
No need to flip a coin. If it's that close, the residual randomness of the process can be used directly: The candidate with more votes wins. Hardly surprising, this is how it's done already.
Re:Right is better than fast (Score:4, Insightful)
In Canada we *get* the results of the election within hours of the polls closing, usually 2 or 3. That's with four federal parties who make the math of who exactly won a little more difficult.
Hand counting isn't as slow as you think it is when you have enough people organized to do the job properly.
Even though our system is unassailable (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:10x the population (Score:5, Insightful)
With hand counted paper ballots, it doesn't take a genius to know you've lost if you (or your party's representatives) watch the votes being taken out of the ballot boxes and counted one by one, and the majority of the votes are for "The Other Party".
Yes you can still cheat, but it's a lot harder to do it and not make it obvious. The cheating is usually in the postal/zombie votes and gerrymandering, and in isolated/remote areas. The electronic system is just as weak in those areas.
With the electronic voting system - how are you going to convince enough people that no cheating is happening?
Re:Its Not like that matters (Score:4, Insightful)
Antiquated is a meaningless metric for an election. What counts is accuracy, and hand counted elections have about a 2% error rate, which is pretty damned good. On the other hand, look at the botched messes that have come of some computerized elections.
I'll take proven 19th century technology that assures me to with about a 98% margin that my vote got counted properly to some private contracter's voting machine that doesn't even puke out a paper record.
Re:Proportional representation (Score:2, Insightful)
The fringe party thing is exactly why you want to avoid proportional representation.
Imagine a scenario of 100 seats total. 49 go to liberals and socialists,49 go to conservatives and reactionaries, and 2 go to truly crazy people (fascists, novelty independence parties, gold bugs, those sorts). Now since no one has a majority, and the lib-socials aren't going cooperate with the conservative - reactionaries the crazy people suddenly are the deciding factor between any piece of legislation being passed. And their support isn't free. They want concessions on whatever their issue is, even if 98% of the electorate think they're insane - they still could inflict massive damage on on the parliamentary process.
First past the post eliminates the fringe from the process. It still lets in crazies of course, but there have to be a lot of them coordinating for that to happen.
The other thing to keep in mind in that in my 100 seat example, the difference between one party having 51 seats, or 100 seats is irrelevant - they can pass whatever they want either way, so whichever election system you have that produces a 1 seat majority or a 50 seat majority is effectively the same.
Re:Proportional representation (Score:5, Insightful)
That's not an argument against proportional representation.
That's an argument for the larger parties not to cave in to stupid demands from the coalition partner.
Re:Perfect (Score:5, Insightful)
Why not just a transferable vote system, which is essentially an elimination vote system without the need of a second or third ballot to decide the winner.
Oddly enough, mathematicians have spent well over a century now coming up with voting systems that deal with the kinds of situations brought up here, but the larger political parties in most FPTP jurisdictions want to retain their dominance, and do not want to mess with some of the more notoriously anomalous results that come from FPTP (or, more to the point, rely on such anomalies).
I remember reading a Scientific American article on the topic about thirteen or fourteen years ago that did a nice job of going over the different kinds of proportional voting systems and how they could be applied in the United States and the UK. The final summation was that there was no such thing as an absolutely fair voting system, but if you were looking for a more deeply flawed, unfair and ultimately disenfranchising voting system, it would be hard to get past just how bad the FPTP system. In three way races like there were in the last Canadian Federal election, you are often looking at almost 2/3s of the votes in a riding basically being tossed out the window, because all that counts is a pure mathematical plurality. If there 100 votes, red and white got 33 votes and blue 34, red and white's voters might as well have not even showed up.
The only defense I've ever seen of the FPTP system that makes sense is that it tends towards more stable legislatures because only the major parties have any hope of getting the number of representatives wearing their jersey to dominate it. Whether that is in Congress or Westminster or Ottawa, this is exactly what the entrenched political class wants; a system that may change the color of the government from red to blue or vice versa, but will give the odds of white, orange or yellow little chance of ever getting high enough numbers to interfere with the "approved" poles of power.
But when you consider that in a two way race, 49.9% of voters wasted their time going to the polls, it's hard to see how the stability argument can possibly override the disenfranchisement argument. In the United States, it makes even less sense than in a pure Westminster country like Canada or Britain. In the US you have a strong executive with an independent veto of legislation (unlike Westminster, where the weak executive of either a monarch or largely ceremonial elected head of state has stripped all but the pretenses of a theoretical veto power), so even with some sort of proportional representative voting system for Congress, a President could still moderate even the worst fringe party, and with far less likelihood that on a fringe matter that Congress could gather the necessary 2/3s of the vote to override it.
It strikes me that the US's division of powers is so refined that it literally begs for a different voting system, whereas too pure a proportional voting system in a country like Israel in fact allows small parties to punch far above their weight, to the point where they become obstacles to democratic will, rather than agents of it.
Re:Proportional representation (Score:5, Insightful)
But looking at countries that do use proportional representation, we don't really witness such things happening. There are several reasons for this:
1) Your example still assumes that, as in a first-past-the-post system, there are two main parties organized along a left-right axis, and that the vote would be almost evenly split between these two parties. However, looking at what happens in actual countries, we see that there is much more diversity in terms of political parties and ideology. It's first-past-the-post that gives rise to the two-party system, not the fact that, say, paleo-conservatives and free-marketers necessarily have to form one party, and environmentalists and auto workers have to form another one. Countries in Europe that use proportional representation typically have many parties: classical liberal parties, social-democratic parties, green parties, more radical left-wing parties, conservative parties, religious (usually Christian-Democratic) parties, etc.
2) There are thresholds that ensure that crazy people do not get seats. Even a 5% threshold does the trick quite well.
3) There are informal norms that say that, when truly crazy people do get seats, the other parties should not enter into a coalition with them ("cordon sanitaire"). Any party that violates these norms would be punished by voters at the next election.
4) Countries with proportional representation seem to have less partisan politics. Yes, there are still tensions between political parties. But bipartisanship is much more common. At the local level especially, it's not uncommon for social-democratic (nominally socialist) and classical liberal parties to enter into a coalition.
Re:Proportional representation (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, but that is A GOOD THING.
This means a single party can not simply institute whatever idiocy that comes into their minds.
1. If they want to pass something extremely one-sided, they will fail.
2. If they want to pass something moderately one-side, they will have to trade by passing something one-sided to another direction
3. If they want to pass something everybody agrees on, they have no problems
2 and 3 is what we call good governing. Note option 2, you apparently dislike so much has the build-in feature of optimizing passing of laws best satisfies the will of the people. A sort of free-market if you will of ideas for government, where the cheapest and best working ideas stand the best chance of being passed.
Re:Proportional representation (Score:4, Insightful)
The US system excludes far more than 5% -- it's essentially pointless to vote for anyone other than the two main parties.
Re:Proportional representation (Score:5, Insightful)
4) Countries with proportional representation seem to have less partisan politics. Yes, there are still tensions between political parties. But bipartisanship is much more common. At the local level especially, it's not uncommon for social-democratic (nominally socialist) and classical liberal parties to enter into a coalition.
That's the main argument I think. In PR you have to work together, things have to be discussed, and mistakes in concepts will be pointed out.
In the US, there are only two parties left, and it is virtually impossible to build up an alternative over a decade or two, while a small party can build up in the PR system, and get small responsibilities first; when tested, it can grow to a larger party.
Re:10x the population (Score:4, Insightful)
Perjury is a serious crime here.
Unless you're the Mayor. Then it's a matter of being too busy to tell the truth.