- cross-posted to:
- usnews
- cross-posted to:
- usnews
Republican efforts to hand count ballots in a seemingly low-profile Texas county primary election has led to a number of errors.
Gillespie County Republicans, led by Chairman Bruce Campbell, decided months ago to hand-count more than 8,000 ballots for the county GOP primary on March 5. Campbell then declared the results completely accurate and certified before, less than an hour after that certification, reversing course and saying discrepancies were found.
“It’s my mistake for not catching that,” Cambell said on Thursday while sitting inside the county election administration office. “I can’t believe I did that.”
The kerfuffle over ballot counting comes after a November rematch between President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump was solidified in primaries last week.
That’s why typically there are other election employees and observers present. Canada’s federal elections are tallied by hand count, and results are always (as far as I’m aware) certified the same day. Canada’s population is about 40 million people, so not quite the US’s 330+ million, but a lot more than this town’s 8000.
Spain also hand counts. At each poll station there are three citizens recruited at random (sort of like jury duty) who run each ballot box. They check voter’s credentials and cross off names from the list. The process is overseen by each parties appointed “overseers”. The whole counting process must be validated by all. I prefer this method. Machines can be tampered with.
Why not machine certify and hand-count verify? Could have both systems for quick results on the day and verified accurate results in the longer term. Have the voting machine print out your results and you can self verify and put them in a secret ballot box to be hand-counted later.
Because the manual system works well and costs little.
Canada already has hand-counted and verified results the same day the election occurs, in a country with a population roughly equivalent to the state of California. Adding machine counting would only add complexity and cost while producing no additional benefits.
Canada doesn’t have voting machines, nor do we want them. Our ballot system is a piece of paper and a pencil. That’s it. That’s our whole voting “machine.”
The real genius is in how the vote counting process works. Every candidate is allowed to provide a representative, often called a scrutineer, to oversee the counting process at each polling station. Scrutineers are allowed to challenge a ballot if they feel it has been attributed to the wrong candidate or should have been considered a spoiled ballot. The doors to the polling station are locked while ballots are being counted, and no one is allowed to go home until the count is complete. Basic self-interest ensures that counts are done in a timely fashion, while also ensuring that every candidate can have a representative that was part of the counting process.
Under the Canadian system, for all practical purposes it would be impossible to perpetrate election fraud. A candidate would need to somehow induce Elections Canada employees and/or volunteers at multiple polling stations to miscount ballots. They would also need to convince multiple scrutineers to turn a blind eye, scrutineers who were nominated by their opponents. Each riding typically has 4+ candidates (at minimum Liberal, Conservative, New Democrat, and Green party candidates, plus often some independent or fringe party candidates), and every single one of those candidates is allowed to provide a scrutineer at each polling station. There will be many polling stations across a single riding, so that’s potentially dozens or hundreds of people that would need to be coerced or convinced to contribute to the election fraud. And that’s just for one single riding.
Right, but do you have a political cult who would willingly stall the process so it would not be completed in a reasonable time just so that they can claim the process is flawed and skewed against them when they lose?
It only “costs little” because you have a ton of people willing to do it. What if there’s something that prevents people from volunteering? Say, snow? Or maybe a worldwide pandemic? Or massive wildfires?
These are all obvious possibilities. There’s really no reason to not machine count with a matching hand count. Extra cost? This is your entire country’s election. It’s not the time to pinch pennies.
First off you say that like it’s a bad thing. For the record, it is not. Second, many of the people counting votes are paid, i.e. Elections Canada employees. Scrutineers could be volunteers or paid employees of the party/candidate they represent.
That would equally inhibit people from voting. Besides which, elections can and have been postponed in cases of severe weather, and wildfires have been considered in cases where they’ve been occurring around an election. No politician or Elections Canada supervisor is going to send voters, employees and volunteers out to die for an election.
We had one, it went fine. Anyone who didn’t like the thought of voting in public had the option of voting by mail, something that every Canadian has been allowed to do since 1993.
Yes there fucking is. Machines add completely unnecessary complexity to a simple system that works.
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Hey, don’t get me wrong, it’s not all sunshine and roses up here in the north. We have huge problems with cost of living, especially housing, which our current government is failing to address. We have a multi-party system but in my lifetime the national power only ever oscillated between two parties, Liberal (roughly equivalent to US Democrats) and Conservative (roughly equivalent to US Republicans pre-MAGA, or maybe even pre-Reagan). Based on current polling, Canadian discontent looks set to sweep out the incumbent Liberals and sweep in the opposition Conservatives sometime between now and Oct. 2025. I don’t think the Conservatives are going to do any better at addressing cost of living, but fear that they’ll bring in a bunch of regressive crap while they continue to fail in the same way the Liberals have failed. There are lots of other areas where Canada has room for improvement, but within the very narrow scope of how Canada runs its elections, that I will claim we got right.
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I still don’t see any reason you can’t do this and have a machine count to compare. Redundancies are never a bad idea, and basically every study which has ever been done on the topic shows that hand counts are generally more error prone than hand audited machine counts.
Any increase in accuracy would not be worth the tradeoff. The current system in Canada is very simple and very visible. Scrutineers for every candidate can watch the votes being counted and immediately understand what is happening. No amount of trust is required for the system to work.
A machine that counts votes would be a black box to observers of the election. Most would need to trust that the machines are operating correctly. When machine counts and manual counts disagree, even slightly, it sows confusion and discord. The mere existence of voting machines and machine counts in the US has been sufficient to give rise to numerous conspiracy theories. In my view they are part of the rot besetting American democracy, and I don’t want them where I live.
Humans can more easily be tampered with (or just be dumb).