Why does America have problems counting?

I went to watch a count for the local elections in May in the UK (I was a candidate)

The papers were counted in front of me and dozens of other people from the various parties. I could see each one going into each pile of ten, each pile of ten being bundled as a pile of 100 and put into a basket, the ambiguous ones (blank, voting for multiple candidates, writing "WANK" next to all candidates but one (which had "NOT WANK" written next to it), went into a separate pile.

At the end of the counting the returning officer went through the ambiguous ones with the candidate or agent and explained if he would accept it or not.

This doesn't take long - it scales, and is fully repeatable by completely different people if needed. The problems that seem to occur are not in the count, but in the returning officers (who tend to be doddery old men) writing the wrong result down, and for some reason this result is final, but that's the same whatever the counting method.

My understanding is that the ballot is more complicated in US elections. You are not voting for a single MP, you are voting for a Representative to the house, and one for the state house. You may be voting for a Senator and a state Governor. You will probably be voting for a host of local officials. In many (most?) states, there are ballot initiatives (sort of like referendums) on various issues. It gets complicated, fast.

That's just numbers. You're making say 5 votes rather than 1. In some places in the UK we can have MEP, MP, Borough Council, Local Council and Mayor all elected on the same day, as well as local referendums.

That's not complicated -- just post each vote in a different box (paper can be different colours) and count them separately. OK it may take a day or two to find out who your local parish councillor is. Whoopee.

Just numbers. But leaving aside ballot questions (of which there are usually around a half dozen in Massachusetts, more in some places like California), there were 13 state-level elected officials in 2018 plus whatever county-level or local officials there were on the town ballot. So you can be making 20-30 choices. That's a lot of paper shuffling.

How on earth do you spend time to adequately research so many decisions without overload?

You don't really. There's usually lots of news about most of the ballot questions and the top state level offices. You may or may not be familiar with your local Congressional race and the lower-level state offices.

You probably start to get fuzzy about your state rep/senator. And are pretty much clueless about the county Sheriff, Board of Selectmen, and Register of Deeds.

In practice, a lot of the positions lower down on the list are running unopposed or have been in their position and seemed to have done fine for a while. Of course, this being Massachusetts, a lot of these seats are pretty much Democrat locks anyway.

In Colorado, we often often have ~15 ballot initiatives, as well as city, county, and state elections. That's on top of the federal elections. Most of our domestic policy is dictated at the local level rather than the federal level, and it is this decentralized nature which flummoxes our European friends.

Local referendums rather than representative democracy is odd - don’t you pay your reps to research the options and make the beat descision. I wouldn’t have time to understand 15 options

We tend to have 5 or 6 layers of government too so I don’t see the problem there.

We do not have a federal sales tax (i.e. VAT). Europe hasn't had yearly GDP growth over 1% in 25 years, and Europe is issuing bonds at negative % rates. The U.S. subsidizes the European military defenses and pharmaceutical prices to boot.

I have no issue with European countries sovereign decisions, but when Europeans project their ideas on Americans I take great offense.

Five votes is very low. 15-20 is common.

Was not wank counted as a vote?

Reminds me of the line from some American tv show where one character says "I don't vote, I just write down Jesus," and another says "we count that as a Republican vote."

Yup (although that wasn't at my count, or indeed election - there are rules about secrecy so I couldn't possibly comment on some of the actual comments)

https://www.joe.co.uk/politics/voter-writes-wnk-all-over-bal...

Here in Russia (and I assume in other countries too) we have rules where the mark can be put and where it cannot be, so if you write anything outside of the box, it won't be counted.

Since a lot of the ways we do things in the states are pretty ridiculous, I feel the need to clarify for foreigners that this does not actually fly. As I recall, it was only a few election cycles ago someone in my state had been convicted of vote fraud for for filling in the republican candidate option on votes that were left blank on ballots which had otherwise voted republican on every other vote. This amounted to two modified ballots.

Are you talking about the ballot harvesting in North Carolina, or the fraud investigations in Georgia? If it's the latter, we don't have any good way to estimate the impact because the ruling party destroyed evidence and canned the investigations[0]

[0] https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.cnn.com/cnn/2019/07/26/poli...

Which combines the best of both (speed and audit-ability).

But you'd need mandatory random audits, and a legal requirement to keep the paper originals for up to years.

There's been cases of the paper ballots being destroyed while legal action was ongoing, and a never audited system cannot be trusted (because there's implied trust, not tested trust).

Again referencing Minnesota, because I've been an election judge and we have the best system in the US...

Mandatory random audits are part of the system. We get automated counts from the Scantron machines, but those are unofficial, preliminary. On election night, there are random audits of some number of voting machines for hand-counts, to detect systematic fraud. And the total number of ballots in each machine is hand-counted to make sure it matches the totals given by the machine.

We do not need speed for results. We can wait 1-2 days for security.

Paper ballots that are hand counted. Ideally, streamed live.

In Russia we had cameras on approximately half of polling stations (about 45 000) and the video was streamed online (the site didn't allow saving videos, but activists managed to write scripts to do it in a short time). The total expenses for this were about $41M.

I'd argue we've ended up here exactly because people are impatient and won't wait for results. If you design a system that declares e.g. the presidency two days later, you're going to run into a lot of resistance.

Use the stats to do it. Oregon does. Results come in fairly timely, and finals can take a couple weeks, depending.

It would be a way better feuilleton to get a trickle of the results during 48hrs.

More seriously, France has paper voting, yet results are published at 8:00:00pm, closing time of the last voting offices. How? Statistics. And only takes the night to confirm, when we’re on a 50,3% kind of results. And it’s already 60m voters; If it works for 60m people, it will work for 300m (especially if only 120m vote in USA).

> But you'd need mandatory random audits, and a legal requirement to keep the paper originals for up to years

Or you publish all the marked ballots, so that anyone who wanted to could do their own count to verify the results.

You can also design this so that any individual voter can check to see that their ballot was included in the count, and counted correctly, without being able to prove to someone else that they voted for a particular candidate (so that vote buying schemes aren't enforceable).

See Scantegrity [1] for a specific system with these properties, which can be implemented on top of existing optical scan vote counting machines. For a more general look at securing voting, see end-to-end auditable voting systems [2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scantegrity

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/End-to-end_auditable_voting_sy...

Going with a hybrid voting system (say filling out paper ballots but having a machine count them, or using a voting machine and having it print paper ballots) isn't getting the best of both worlds, it's getting the worst of both.

To use a metaphor, it's not having 2 locks on your front door, it's having 2 different keys that open the same lock.

Say you have a hybrid system, and the numbers come in and the electronic and paper counts disagree. Which one is used as the true vote?

If you take the paper, then what was the point of the electronic? If you take the electronic what was the point of the paper? If you throw out all votes where the paper and electronic disagree, you just enabled any "fraudster" the ability to disenfranchise any subset of votes by breaking either system.

You also can't exactly pick and choose which to accept per instance (could you imagine the abuse that could come from that!?), and methods of "averaging" them don't really solve the problem as much as they make it marginally harder to pull off (to sway 1% of votes in a 50%/50% weighted system, you'd only need to hack 2% of the electronic machines). And of course using a significant "disagreement" between paper and electronic to trigger re-doing an election isn't a solution either because if they hacked it the first time, chances are they can do it again. Not mention that having a second voting day because the first was taken over by fraud is going to be a logistical nightmare, it will change who can come out to vote, and it may even change who/what people will vote for.

If what you want is an audit or a second count, then call for more exit polls or an explicitly secondary system. But this whole dual-voting idea isn't really a good one when you really dive into the dirty details of how it would work.

It gives you grounds to annul the result and re-vote, after re-verifying the software. You do open the possibility of secondary effects (votes not on the annual election day typically get much lower turnout) and denial-of-service attacks.

Relying on randomness is not good enough, not for voting. A chance, no matter how small, of a different candidate than the one actually voted in by the people getting in to office is not worth the risk.

No matter how small? What about one in a million? One in ten million? This is literally what statistics is for - randomness is a powerful tool against fraud, not some weak cop-out.

That chance always exists. Your choices are to minimize it or pretend it doesn’t exist, but there’s no way to actually eliminate it.

Why?

If the result is 49.999% vs. 50.001%, you cannot conclude anything meaningful about the will of the people. Maybe the weather was just slightly worse in a neighborhood supporting the losing candidate and it tipped the result slightly.

So even if the voting process is perfect, that close of a result is totally random for other reasons.

Most people don't seem to be capable of thinking about non-determinism like this, though. Witness the huge number of Americans who think the presidential election is illegitimate because Trump got 46% of the vote to Clinton's 48%, when honestly 46 vs. 48 is very little difference in terms of what they mean about the general will about Americans.

On the other end of the political spectrum, witness the amount of Brits who think a 52-48 vote to leave the EU is somehow relevant.

In calculus/analysis terms: this is why proportional representation parliamentary systems are better -- because the function from "how many people support which parties" to "what policies you end up with" is not discontinuous.

If the UK ran on a proportional system, they'd be getting some sort of very soft, Norway model Brexit. If the US did, a center-right Democrat like Clinton or Biden would be PM.

I was talking about random audits on top of targeted audits if suspicious activity exists just to be clear.

Routine double counting all votes would be controversial due to the high cost.

I've never seen anyone advocate abolishing recounts for close races. Random audits all of the time is an addition to current procedures, not a replacement.

We already have an 11% failure rate for the presidency, and it has nothing to do with recording votes accurately.

I'm also okay with a recipe based system, where a snazzy machine UI is used to produce a paper record of the vote.

I'd go the other way -- use machines to mark ballots in a human-readable way, so that manual processes can be used to validate the machine processes be questioned.

The whole electronic voting movement started because people had difficulty with ballots in Florida; a _good_ UI would help alleviate this.

This is how I've always voted in Florida.

The really dumb problem with those is that the vote counts are stored in removable media - back in 2000 they were often referred to as "cartridges", and when mandated to do a recount, certain election officials choose to interpret it as just checking again what vote counts were reported by the cartridges. Or worse, just checking their Access database again that they put the vote count into, to re-read the vote totals there. This is some of what happened during the 2000 recounts. Ballots that were supposed to be recounted were never actually physically recounted.

Still, better than touchscreens, if you can mandate audits and that recounts actually mean counting the physical ballots themselves.

> in Florida

This is not a vote of confidence for this particular method.

This is how New York does it.