Re: E-voting in Japan

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

Begin forwarded message:

From: Geoff Kuenning <geoff () cs hmc edu>
Date: May 28, 2007 8:31:21 PM EDT
To: David Farber <dave () farber net>
Cc: ip ip <ip () v2 listbox com>
Subject: Re: E-voting in Japan

John Levine writes:

> 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.

As others have pointed out in the past, the U.S. has an unusually
complex electoral system that makes counting much more difficult than
in most other places.  It's not instant-runoff and other complex
counting methods that cause the trouble, it's the profusion of ballot
measures and partially overlapping voting districts.

A typical ballot in the U.S. includes 5 to 40 different votes.  Some
are statewide, some based on other political subdivisions such as
county and city, while others are based on districts that have no
relationship to any other subdivision.  As well as the obvious city,
county, and state (which are usually nicely subsetted), a voter can
reside in a school district, a water district, a state assembly
district, a state senatorial district, and a federal Congressional
district, all over which overlap in essentially random ways.  There
can also be a judicial district, a special assessment district, a
redevelopment district, and almost anything else you care to name.  My
own polling place sometimes has orange and green voting booths because
people living in different parts of the city have different ballots.

To make matters even more fun, each district has its own rules (for
example, "vote for any three") that must be properly enforced during
the counting process.  It's certainly _possible_ to count ballots by
hand, but it's inefficient, expensive, and slow.  One could argue that
it would be better to adopt the system used by some other countries,
where the voter has to fill only one office, and parallelized hand
counting can be completed in an evening.  But that's not how things
work in the U.S. right now.
--
    Geoff Kuenning   geoff () cs hmc edu   http://www.cs.hmc.edu/~geoff/

Statistics don't bore people, people bore people.


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