Did you know most of Europe hand counts their paper ballots?

[questionseverything]

Last edited Wed Nov 20, 2024, 08:43 PM - Edit history (1)

Germany has specifically banned anything except hand counted paper ballots because it’s in their constitution that citizens have the right to oversee every part of the government

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From the replies, there are a couple questions I want to address

First off , they don’t have as many races

My answer, we are only talking about counting one race, the president

Second off,
They don’t have as many people

My answer, we vote in small precincts, mine usually has about 1200 voters, no one is suggesting we count the whole state together

Third question/point,
Humans make mistakes

My answer, maybe we need some honor roll 4th graders that can stack ballots in stacks of fifty, seriously sort and stack isn’t that hard

[Fiendish Thingy]

1. Did you know most of Europe's ballots have but a single race?

Voters vote for their member of Parliament, or whatever the legislative body is called, and that’s it.

Same here in Canada for both federal and provincial races- just one race, one single vote, per ballot.

The exception is for municipal elections, those have more than one race (multiple city council positions, mayor, etc)

Provincial (BC) and municipal ballots are tabulated by machine.

[JT45242]

2. We have more than 4 times as many people as any country that actually votes in europe

Scantron type machines of paper ballots are super accurate.

It's why high stakes testing has used them since they were invented by Iowa professor who founded the ACT test and worked on the Iowa Test of Basic skills.

The upload process would be the vulnerable part from my perspective.

Germany is roughly 20-25 percent the population of the US...and roughly 4 percent the land mass. The scale of both makes a huge difference. The disparities in population density in the US are unlike any country in Europe as they don't have anything that compares to the densities of NY, Chicago etc and the wide open area of rural America all participating in the same election.

Scantrons sheets are fine. We should randomly back check 3-5% like high stakes testing SAT, ACT, AP, etc.

No one should be completely paperless with no hard copy backup.

Yes Russia is like 1/3 the population of the US in Europe but they don't really get to vote.

[eppur_se_muova]

7. When vote counts are done heirarchically, the process time should be O(log n), not O(n).

Small batches are counted, then the totals sent for a second totaling. Those results are then sent for a third total, if need be. The time required to count depends on the number counted in each small batch, and the number of levels in the heirarchy. Increasing the number of votes several fold should add one step to the heirarchy, increasing the time by a fraction (maybe a large fraction, like 1/3 if there were three levels to begin with) but much, much less than a doubling.

Elections can be fast or accurate, but the latter is more important. The large number of ballots is not an insuperable obstacle.

[dsc]

3. because other than France those countries don't elect

a nationwide leader. They have a bunch of district races and their districts are vastly smaller than ours. A congressional seat in the US has over 700k people. A german one as about 280k.

[Igel]

4. And their ballots are quite different.

Often one or two races with multiple parties running for each race.

You want to hand count them, each ballot gets counted for just a couple of races (sometimes you get 2 votes on a given race). You vote for a party and the party makes the decision as to who your vote actually got appointed. It takes days.

Now, consider a typical ballot that I've seen in TX with 80-90 races/issues covering multiple pages, with multiple races or issues on each page.

[Emile]

5. I remember myself and two other union

brothers counting Ballots in our local election. We counted three times and had the exact count 2 out of 3. Humans make mistakes.

[questionseverything]

6. Kick for new points

[snot]

8. The thing is,

it's a lot harder to cheat on a massive scale with physical ballots -- tends to require more physical effort, more conspirators, etc.

Even if it took a month to count paper ballots by hand, I'd consider it worth the wait.

[questionseverything]

9. Counting one race precinct by precinct should take a few hours not days

The exception might be the states that count all the absentee ballots for a county together, that could be a huge number but let’s say you take 20,000 ab ballots, break them up into ten groups of 2000 ballots and get ten teams of honor roll fourth graders then we are still talking a few hours

[LiberalFighter]

10. In my county there are multiple precincts at each polling place.

I had fifteen elections or issues to vote on.

Back in the eighties and before we had machines we voted on that had levers to pull.

[questionseverything]

11. We are only talking about hand counting the presidential race for this discussion

How many people get run through your polling place with multiple precincts?