Reply #28: If you don't want "electrified" elections, move

[Kelvin Mace]

to a country with no electricity.

No matter HOW you break things down, you will create a logistical nightmare and require an army of counters. Personally, I would prefer machine counts (OpScan) with an a small army watching the random sampling hand counts, which, like exit polling, are highly effective at spotting fraud.

As someone pointed out, it's called science, and is all the rage.

The more humans you insert into a system, the more chances you have for mishap (fraud, miscount, destruction/altering of ballots whether accidental or deliberate.

Assume a simple election with 25 races on the ballot. Assume a small county with six employees of the BoE doing the counting. In order to have any chance of ACCURATELY recording the results you would have to count each ballot 25 times (each ballot is about 11x17). If a person can count 25 ballots a minute (remember, you are dealing with large pieces of paper which must be counted ACCURATELY, and you must deal with people not marking the ballot exactly according to instructions) and there are 25,000 ballots cast, you need 16.6 man hours to count ONE race, 416.7 man hours to count the entire election. Divide by the six employees, and it takes 69.4 hours to count this small county, almost THREE DAYS working 24 hours a day. REalistically, we are not going to have these people working 69 hours straight, so we break it up into 8 hour days and we don't get our election results until almost NINE days later.

Oh yeah, folks are going to wait NINE days to find out who won the election.

So, what can we do to speed things up? We can add more people, right? But WHO vettes these people? Who will insure that the folks volunteering to count ballots aren't GOP staff members (remember Florida)?

And should we not count the ballots TWICE to be sure our count is accurate? Now we have to wait almost THREE weeks for the results. And what happens if the results differ? Do we counts a THIRD time? How big a deviation is acceptable?

What happens when we move into my county which has 12 employees, but must count 300,000 ballots? How about in places like NYC where a million people will vote?

Any attempt to speed things up requires more people, more money and more supervision (which requires more people and more money) and increases the likelihood of ballots being lost or damaged.

And as we add people, can we only add one counter? Don't we need a counter from each party who will then cast votes to determine if they agree that the vote on the ballot is for a particular candidate?

Folks, do the MATH!

No election is "tamper-proof". The best you can hope for is "highly tamper-resistant". You pick the most reliable means to tally the votes, you employ various safeguard to prevent chicanery, and your prosecute the living daylights out of anyone caught screwing around.

In this day and age this translates into OpScan, random hand-counts of a statistically significant portion of the ballots, with reasonable trustworthy people watching.

This gives us the safety of paper, the speed of computers, with human guardians armed with statistical mathematics for fairness and accuracy.