Already, there's contention.
For heaven's sake! What is so wrong with a cross on a piece of paper? Or at least getting the technology *right*. With this kind of cock-up hanging over the process before polling day even comes around, it messes with the mandate and the authority of whoever wins.
7 comments:
Everything wrong with putting an "X" on a piece of paper, it should be 1,2,3,....as in STV
If someone can't be arsed to go to a local polling station or send a vote in the post then they should just not have the vote.
The Australians got this right over five years ago. For the Americans not to follow their lead smacks of pigheadedness, if not worse.
Anonymous: Absolutely, I agree. But this isn't a post about electoral systems, it's a post about actual physical means of casting a vote in an existing system. If you want to go and write about electoral reform yourself, go do so. If not, at least refrain from straying completely off the point here.
John: you're missing the point by an even bigger margin. This isn't about text or email voting and if you'd bothered to follow the link you would know that. If you're going to have a smart-arsed (and bordering on fascist) comment to make then the least you can do is read the original post first.
Tch. Some people.
Thanks for the link, Frank. I hadn't seen that bit of news before :)
To be fair to the Americans, their system wouldn't be one X on one sheet of paper, but over a hundred Xs on a hundred separate sheets.
I've seen several friends' postal ballots spread across the states of New Hampshire, California, New York and Oregon - and possibly others I may have forgotten. Often, they are an X on a sheet of paper and the ballot-book is the size of a short novel. I think there are practical constraints on hand-counting that many separate elections.
There are electronic systems that work - OMR and DRE/VVPB. Both have the property that there is a authoritative paper ballot that can be counted in a dispute, and a proportion of the elections should be hand-counted anyway as an audit.
Frank Little is right, but that's not the whole solution; even if the code is open-sourced, there is still the question of ensuring that the machine in the polling station is actually running the program it's supposed to be running.
Here's a fun one: Suppose someone at Intel was up to something, and adjusted the microcode of the processor to detect the open source election program and amend the results. Yes, it would be hard, but not impossible; and no programmer would be able to see it coming. Only a monitoring process that is entirely manual can catch something that fundamental.
Well, we don't get it right in the UK, either!
Then again, even with only using electronic equipment for counting, we can't say who won the London Mayoral elections!
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