Family member who happened to be an upper-level software product manager told me twenty years ago that hand counting of ballots is the only way to absolutely assure vote integrity. She hasn’t changed her mind since then.


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Should be done at precinct level with public oversight as well.

And told us who won....

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/history_lesson/2000/10/was_nixon_robbed.html

I grew up with missing ballot boxes, the claimed election theft above, hanging chads, etc. I don't think going back to paper ballots would make things any better. I do know if we try it, people will be grousing about the final/certified vote tally not coming in for days, and the conspiracies that will produce.

I remember a Canadian election some years ago that reported final (full count) results 4 hours after the close of the west coast polls. They use hand marked, hand counted paper ballots. In that election there was one small problem. The ballot box for one polling place was stolen and tossed into a pond. It was recovered stilled locked. The officials decided that since the ballot box had been out of their hands to contact all the voters to re vote. Since this was in an eastern province they had time to do it.

I think a large part of our problems could be resolved if we went to a standard system in all 50 states rather than each state doing their own thing. As to the missing ballot boxes stories, I submit those are a combination of sour grapes with a unhealthy dash of lack of trust in the system.

This is how paper ballots are counted in Canada:
Vote counting

After the polls close, every deputy returning officer counts the votes for his or her polling station, assisted by the poll clerk and witnessed by the candidates or their representatives.

The deputy returning officer records the number of votes received by each candidate and the number of rejected ballots on a Statement of the Vote. The ballots and other election documents are then sealed in the ballot box and delivered to the returning officer.
http://www.elections.ca/content.aspx?section=vot&dir=faq&document=faqelec&lang=e#a7

their candidate loses. Maybe they are more "felonious." Maybe we just can't accept losing.

Hand counting paper ballots at the precinct level will most likely yield a small margin of error, however deploying election fraudsters to each of the precincts (largest county, LA County has 4600 precincts)or at least to strategic precincts to do the dirty work will be exponentially more difficult to achieve than having electronic voting machines where what you see is not necessarily what you get with software/hardware, and you don't need a physical human presence anywhere to achieve massive fraud in all precincts, or strategic precincts, or solely at the central tabulator, or a combo. It's retail vs. wholesale fraud.

Use of software/hardware in elections is like handing off ballots to a republican controlled corporation with proprietary software to calculate your election outcome

Take a look at where we are now with elections: Republicans now dominate state government with 32 legislatures and 33 governors

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2016/11/14/1598918/-Republicans-now-dominate-state-government-with-32-legislatures-and-33-governors

I assure you, if we were still using hand counted paper ballots we would not have this statistic

Pollworking duty could be implemented using the jury duty system and citizens would only have to help tabulate an election once every few years. I think people, knowing the stakes involved, would be amenable to having that responsibility given to them.

Automatic voter-registration. Automatic updates to the voter-registry.

You get your election-notification one month ahead by mail.

In Germany, voting is on Sundays, 8am to 6pm, typically in a school in your neighborhood.

To identify yourself, you have to show your notification and an ID.

Pen&paper.

You may stay to witness them counting the votes and even record it on video, though there's some heavy restrictions on how you must behave.

The polls close at 6pm, then there's 2 hours of political commentary with initial results on TV and by 8pm we have a result that's already very close to the final result.

- ID requirement for voting is not a big deal, because all citizens must have the "Personalausweis" (or passport, or both) anyway so it's not a voter suppresion technique
- When polls close at 6pm, news media instantly publish the "Prognose", which is based on exit polls and usually very close to the actual results.
- There are regular updates (e.g. at 6:20, 7:00, 8:00, ..) called "Hochrechnung" where actual vote counts are combined with exit polls. Overnight they publish the "Vorläufiges amtliches Endergebnis" (~"preliminary official end result&quot once counting is done. (We have relatively small precincts, so hand counting only takes a few hours max.) If any errors (in transmission etc) are spotted that result might be updated later.

- Election officials may recruit volunteers or even force citizens to help with counting the votes (this is similar to jury duty in the US). They receive a small financial compensation.
- As DetlefK explained, anybody is allowed to stay during the election and after 6pm to monitor the election / counting process.

Citizens are called to serve in the precincts and count the votes (similar to our calls to jury duty). Paper ballots are counted by hand, and all members of the count panel must agree upon the results before the ballots are sent in a sealed package to a central location (to be available for later review, if needed), while the results of the vote are communicated (I think by computer) to a central entity, as well. This allows the country-wide results to be known in a few hours.

Voters present their national identity cards in order to vote. The ID cards are also used when citizens use the national health service and in other situations in which an ID is required.

thanks for posting this info!

wouldn't it be nice to see PBS do a thirty minute voting special on how it is done around the world?

It matters much less how fast the vote count goes than it matters that it be done accurately and verifiably.

The US has the worlds longest campaigns (4 years) and the world's shortest vote counts. The first is too long and the latter is much too quick.

American exceptionalism again. The balance is exceptionally out of whack.

seems like it's a corporate media thing to feign impatience with delivery of election results

and I remember my local NPR (lots 'o corporate funding) station talk show host being sooooo impatient with the vote count in 2000 --

It may require more personnel or different ballot design, but use of computers is not the solution.

unless we go through that stupid fiasco with the floating chads??? is that what they were called in Florida.

Sequoia Voting Systems Responsible for 2000 Presidential Debacle?

https://www.wired.com/2007/08/sequoia-voting/

snip...the fingers point to Sequoia Voting Systems, which not only makes e-voting machines that replaced punch cards but also created the punch cards that failed in Florida.

(Dan) Rather and his producers spoke with several former workers of Sequoia who revealed that in 2000 the company changed the paper stock it used for punch cards to paper made by Boise Cascade and that they knew before the election that the punch cards that Sequoia was producing would cause problems. In fact, pre-election testing by Sequoia showed that the cards were not punching cleanly and that dangling chads were going to be a likely problem in the election...snip

I misspoke but did I make you giggle. Thanks for the correction.

It's refreshing to see that some countries still value democracy enough to get it right and keep it verifiable with recounts if necessary. There's also the citizen participation factor in counting/recounting all those ballots.

and the California primaries? More than half the votes came in on paper ballots - and people -even on DU - were bitching about how long it was taking to count them all.

Yeah, the US could do it if we wanted to go to one-issue ballots like a lot of countries do. And even the UK has a few outlying districts such as the furthest of the Orkney islands that take about a day to get their ballots in. The UK and the other countries cited in this thread have the additional advantage of having only one time zone, so they don't have to put up with talking heads on the other side of a continent impatient to announce results while polls are still open in much of the country.

would be great if on election day there were one time zone only for the nation!!

Teevee and the decades-old race to be the first network to project the winners is largely what has driven the misguided automation of U.S. voting systems that may now be susceptible to Russian hackers.

No more cross check and gerrymandering. We must also protect every state's voter registration rolls.

Media wants a race as to who announces the winner first. Plus ad revenue would end on election day. Most Americans want instant gratification. Not to mention that repubs are in power, at fed & state level, & hand-counted paper ballots would be to their detriment.

I don't think I can trust computers anymore to be used in voting, too easy to hack into, for those that are in the know. In my area (in Canada) during the day of the election (before computers) there was representatives from each party watching things and they would be there from opening to closing and especially just before closing and they would watch each polling table to watch votes being counted. The only way to go!! IMO of course.