Re: E-voting in Japan

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

Begin forwarded message:

From: Jonathan Thornburg <jthorn () aei mpg de>
Date: May 29, 2007 3:21:59 AM EDT
To: David Farber <dave () farber net>
Cc: Jonathan Thornburg <jthorn () aei mpg de>, ip () v2 listbox com
Subject: Re: [IP] Re: E-voting in Japan

Geoff Kuenning wrote
> A typical ballot in the U.S. includes 5 to 40 different votes.
[[details of complicated set of overlapping districts/things-being- 
voted-on]]
> It's certainly _possible_ to count ballots by
> hand, but it's inefficient, expensive

This is simply not true.  If you run the system properly, hand
vote-counting is efficient and no more expensive than elections already
are (i.e. uses no personnel who are not already being payed to run the
elections).  The key is to
(a) Have a sepraate ballot for each thing-being-voted-on
    (e.g. a ballot for the presidential election,
     a separate ballot for city council,
     a separate ballot for school board,
     a separate ballot for the state lawm-mowing commission)
    Typically different ballots are printed on different-colored
    and/or different-sized pieces of paper, to reduce the risk of
    confusing them.
and
(b) Have a separate ballot box for each thing-being-voted-on
    (with prominent signage saying "presidential ballots",
     "local dog-catcher ballots", etc).

Then at the end of the day, you count each separate ballot box
(by hand), with the counting watched by representatives of all the
different political parties.


> and slow.

In Canadian elections (which use just the system I described above),
the typical time from polls closing to results being phoned to the
central office is around 1 to 1.5 hours.


The key *advantage* of hand counting is that it's *very* hard to commit
widespread fraud -- or at least widespread fraud at at the vote-casting-
-and-counting stage -- without getting caught:
* Representatives of each political party get to inspect the ballot
  boxes before polls open, to verify that they're empty.
* Representatives of each political party get to inspect the blank
  ballot papers to see that there's nothing prejudicial about them.
* Representatives of each political party get to watch the voting
  process during the day to see that there are no political ads in
  voting booths, pressuring voters, running out of ballots, etc etc.
* Representatives of each political party get to watch the ballots
  being counted.  (The actual counting is done -- by hand -- by
  non-partisan election officials, but party representatives are
  right there watching.)  It would take a fairly skilled "card-cheat"
  to palm ballots without being seen (given that s/he is being watched
  by several other people from all angles, including sometimes some
  standing behind and looking over the counter's shoulders).  But
  more important, it would be *very* hard to do this on a scale
  massive enough to influence a major election, without getting
  caught -- this would require a network of thousands of "card cheats"
  being infiltrated into the election administration.


> 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.

Of course it's not how they work in the U.S. _right_now_ -- I thought
this whole discussion was about how the system could be changed to
reduce its vulnerability to <<insert well-known list of problems with
current U.S. voting technology>>.

--
-- Jonathan Thornburg (remove -animal to reply) <J.Thornburg () soton ac- 
zebra.uk>
   School of Mathematics, U of Southampton, England
   "Washing one's hands of the conflict between the powerful and the
    powerless means to side with the powerful, not to be neutral."
                                      -- quote by Freire / poster by  
Oxfam



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