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?"
Re:Perfect (Score:5, Interesting)
There is a fundamental flaw in elections today: lack of consideration for "margin of error". In my opinion, margin of error should be calculated and any election which falls within the margin of error should either be held again or some sort of tie breaker should kick in.
Pretending that we can deduce the intention of every voter with zero errors is noble, naive, and ridiculous.
Right is better than fast (Score:5, Interesting)
Why is there an obsession with getting the the results of an election within hours/minutes of the polls closing?
In the USA elections are in early November, POTUS isn't sworn in until mid January. Take a week or two to count the votes.
German elections (Score:4, Interesting)
In Germany, we had a long discussion about voting machines in recent years. In the end the Bundesverfassungsgericht (Supreme Court) decided, that present voting machines are not able to provide the necessities for a democratic elections, as it has to be anonymous, equal, and verifiable by any person. A computer counting votes, does not allow any verification. A computer with a paper trail, is hard to evaluate, as the log must be visible to the voter and if there went something wrong it must be changeable. Even though, it must be ensured that the machine is not printing extra votes, which would require someone standing beside the machine all time. Therefore, they ruled them inadequate for any election in Germany.
Beside that, they are still able to present exit polls, right after closing of the polling stations, and the preliminary results, are presented on the same evening. This is fast enough for my taste. The verified result is presented some days later. But, all elections can be recounted at a later time, by anyone if he or she is not satisfied by the results.
accuracy vs precision (Score:4, Interesting)
There is a fundamental flaw in elections today: lack of consideration for "margin of error". In my opinion, margin of error should be calculated and any election which falls within the margin of error should either be held again or some sort of tie breaker should kick in.
Pretending that we can deduce the intention of every voter with zero errors is noble, naive, and ridiculous.
As long as the election precision is within the accuracy of the election measurement then either candidate is equally qualified by definition. Just flip a coin when things are within the margin of error. Things like bad weather, a flu outbreak at school, a big traffic jam, or a huge mega death concert down town can tip the number of voters. Elections are not perfect measurements of citizen will. they are a good approximation. No need to say that one politician got one more vote, he is more qualified. The fact that they are tied tells you they are equally qualified.
IN the national elections the last thing we want is to elect someone who got a few more votes. We want someone who earned their votes from as broad a base as possible. A very good geographic proxy for "broad base" is to outpoll in as many states as possible. This proxy is also useful since the senate has a small state bias that until we eliminate the senate, we need a president who won in a majority of the senators states if he's going to govern.
Thus we need to invent a system that to first order follows the popular vote, but that as it heads towards a tie that the winner is determined by who won in the most states. I just can't think of a good name for such a system.
Re:Its Not like that matters (Score:5, Interesting)
Hand-counting may be prone to errors, but the errors are small and localized. It would take enormous resources to get away with massive fraud in a hand-counted system.
With electronic voting, on the other hand, you only need to exploit one flaw in the system to perpetrate massive undetectable fraud.
In fact, I can't think of anything else where we would want things done by hand versus machine in the 21st century.
What a ridiculous statement. Sometimes new technology is just new, not better. If you want to throw democracy down the sewer, then by all means go for electronic voting. As a Canadian, I'm happy to stick with our old, understandable and reliable technology.
Re:I'm Canadian (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm also Canadian, from the wonderful province of Québec.
A couple of years ago, they did some kind of "super city elections". Pretty much every city and village of the province had elections held on the same day, most of them using an electronic voting system. It was, I think, the best type available : your ballot wasn't any different then the one we're used to, just white circles on a black background. The difference was that instead of putting it in a box, you'd put it in a scanner first and it would fall in a bin after that. Re-counting, if necessary was pretty straight forward.
It was, however, the last time I saw electronic voting used in the province. Because of electoral law, the electronic ballots were kept at the voting stations until they were closed, the scanners would then upload their results in batch onto the servers of the company that had been chosen to do the counting. It failed miserably, possibly because of the amount of data they had to process at once, most probably because they had a web facing interface where you could go and watch the results coming in live. Most ballot boxes had to be recounted by hand and the results had to be phoned in.
Re:Vote counting is the least of the USA's problem (Score:2, Interesting)
In fact one of the school boards did up a budget that the provincial BC Liberals disagreed with. They fired the (democratically elected) board.
Re:10x the population (Score:0, Interesting)
There is one reason the system does NOT scale. Canada uses a parliamentary system, Votes only have to be totalled in each riding (district) to see who wins that district, and then the party taking the largest number of seats forms a government. Add to that the smaller population (smaller number of votes) and larger number of seats at stake, and its easy to see how the system works more quickly. Plus we tend not to have as many issues on the ballot at any one time.
Re:Perfect (Score:4, Interesting)
That's statistically a marginal problem.
Even when you have to look for hanging chads to establish who's the next president :)
Re:You know where else they hand count the ballots (Score:4, Interesting)
6 paid demonstrators, and a bunch of others who were identified as staff members to the Bush campaign and Republican congressmen who just happened to receive cushy jobs in the Bush White House. Organized, quite proudly, by then-Republican Congressman John Sweeney.
Re:Proportional representation (Score:4, Interesting)
PR works well where this is a substantial centre party (eg Germany) and badly where there isn't (eg Israel). Most systems also have a lower cutoff, so you have to get 5 or 10% of the vote before you get any seats, which excludes the real loonies.
Re:Proportional representation (Score:4, Interesting)
That's an argument for the larger parties not to cave in to stupid demands from the coalition partner.
See what happens in israel.
If you have a coalition partner you have to cave to some of their demands, or they won't stay part of the coalition (even the Lib dems in the UK are going through this). But this actually happens on an issue by issue basis rather than on a coalition basis.
Minority governments, however you get them, are dominated by figuring out who is easiest to pander to on any given bill, and figuring out what you trade to them. Where I am (in ontario canada) the liberal minority have to trade things like more union protection, more taxes etc. if they want socialist (NDP, who are only kind of socialist these days) support, or less taxes and less regulation if they want conservative support.
And the pandering isn't necessarily related to the bill at hand. Want to sign a trade deal, you have to pass a language law, or do something with settlements in the west bank etc.
If the conservatives in the UK (who are the lead party in coalition with the liberal democrats) just decide they won't go along with wealth taxation, and the lib dems get their backs up about it, the UK will have to go to an election. Which could quite possibly end up back where they are now, needing another election. Etc.
Now the UK and canada examples are countries that don't have full on proportional representation (fortunately), germany is a sort of proportional - but the 5% cutoff keeps the "National Democratic Party of Germany - Peoples Union" (the neo -nazi's basically) out of sets, as they'd need to more or less triple their vote count. But you can see where this could go badly.
No randomness: Recount (Score:5, Interesting)
No need to depend on a coin flip or residual randomness: just have a runoff between the two tied candidates.
Why - you already have the votes recount them until you get consistency. This is not some physical measurement which has some inherent uncertainty. In the UK if the votes are within a certain margin the candidates can ask for a recount. I seem to remember in one recent election the vote difference in one constituency was single digits and there were several recounts (in this case demanded by the returning officer) until the result was consistent.
Of course this does mean that you need to be able to count votes quickly. There are no partial results in UK elections - each MP's constituency will only report when all the votes are counted with the first ones reporting within a couple of hours of the close of the polls. While projections of the next government are made early in the evening based on the early reporting constituencies nobody concedes defeat or claims victory until they actually, legally have it i.e. they have won enough MPs to form the next government. It was quite a shock the first time I saw a US election to see that politicians were making decisions on projections of who had won instead of waiting until they actually knew. Perhaps if they did that some effort might be made to increase the speed and accuracy of your counting.
Re:No randomness: Recount (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:10x the population (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm an American and recent Canadian immigrant - I haven't voted here, in Canada, yet. But I've been receiving "you are registered to vote" cards for about at least a decade.
The point is: counting is only a fairly small, technical part of the problem. WHO VOTES is if anything, more important. not only outright fraud (double voting, or voting in the wrong riding), but clear campaigns of voter suppression (phone calls claiming to be from Elections Canada, but which provided a misleading polling place.) our current "majority" government might well be illegitimate - and oddly enough, Elections Canada is reluctant to make much of an effort to find out. on tactic is to delay any investigation - this has already succeeded in burying evidence of who paid for those misleading phone calls. other charming things: voting records have "disappeared" from close elections, where the margin (26 votes IIRC) were well within the "margin of possible fraud".
In short, the Canadian system definitely does not work well, and may have permitted profound errors recently. in comparison to the existing flaws, I don't see a lot of threat from the obvious issues related to non-paper voting. the country would clearly be better off if we had decent participation.