Re: E-voting in Japan

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

Begin forwarded message:

From: John Levine <johnl () iecc com>
Date: May 26, 2007 11:25:29 PM EDT
To: dave () farber net
Cc: Rodney Van Meter <rdv () sfc wide ad jp>
Subject: Re: [IP] E-voting in Japan

> But it does appear to have the advantage of being efficient.  If
> paper ballot results can be returned in so little time, what is the
> incentive for electronic balloting?

I wish that more people asked this question.  Canada uses paper
ballots, counts them by hand, and it works fine.  Each polling place
counts its ballots when the polls close, then they get the informal
election eve numbers the same way everyone else does, by phoning them
in to regional offices where they're added up on a spreadsheet.

The plausible arguments in favor of electronic voting are pretty weak.
On complex ballots, e.g., vote for 2 of N candidates, they can prevent
overvotes, although I've never heard that as a major problem to solve.
They can be friendlier to the blind, although I'd think that problem
would be more effectively addressed by standardizing the layout of the
paper ballots and providing a few generic machines that can read the
ballots over headphones and direct the user to the right place to make
the mark.

The one situation in which electronic voting does speed up the vote
count is in STV "instant runoff" preference ballots.  When I lived in
Cambridge Mass, the only place in the country that uses them, 20 years
ago, the ballots were marked and counted by hand which took a week.
(It wasn't a problem, since there was more than a month between the
election and the start of the terms.)  I gather that they hired some
MIT guys to automate it so the ballots are now mark sense paper, fed
into a scoring machine.  But even they are still paper.

Regards,
John Levine, johnl () iecc com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for  
Dummies",
Information Superhighwayman wanna-be, http://www.johnlevine.com, ex- 
Mayor
"More Wiener schnitzel, please", said Tom, revealingly.



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