General Discussion
Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsGermany hand counts their ballots, results in quickly
Look how quickly Germany got the results in and ADF was blocked out, thank goodness.
I'm confident we would have had different results if we could have hand counted our ballots. We really need to push for this, don't tell me we don't have time to count ballots. We would need more volunteers on election Day to count ballots!
Most of the rest Democracies hand count theirs, look what happened to us.
= new reply since forum marked as read
Highlight:
NoneDon't highlight anything
5 newestHighlight 5 most recent replies
yourout
(8,825 posts)If we were serious about it we have a national holiday to vote.
Then we'll declare a national holiday, also they'll have to stop with these special elections every 6 weeks like they do in my district it's ridiculous.
vote over a two day period. We voted early this last election and it was a three hour long wait to vote. There were only two places to vote in my county, and they were not open Monday through Friday. It was a couple of days for two weeks. The place we would normally vote has such a small parking lot we decided to do early voting. At least the parking lot was a bit bigger.
DENVERPOPS
(13,003 posts)DeJoy has resigned, so that Trump could appoint himself the Commissioner of the USPS......there goes any assumption that the results of all Mail In Voting will be legit.
The USPS is especially up for trashing, not only to screw up the entire nation, but, as an especially coveted award, they will obliterate one of the largest unions in the United States.......
OMGWTF
(5,133 posts)
Nictuku
(4,660 posts)
keepthemhonestO
(628 posts)We are headed in that direction aren't we?
Aussie105
(7,929 posts)AI counts votes: 'One for Elon. One for who? Nah, invalid vote, ignore it!'
Compulsory voting here in Australia.
Hand filled voting slips, get your name checked off a list. Better not vote twice, or forget, you will be found out and questions will be asked!
Hand counting all the way.
Boxes sealed at end of counting if a recount is needed.
Running tallies on local TV.
Results mostly finalized within a day or two.
keepthemhonestO
(628 posts)We can't let that happen.
That sounds like a good road map for us to use when we rebuild after....
Silver Gaia
(5,363 posts)
Irish_Dem
(81,345 posts)keepthemhonestO
(628 posts)Their reign will be short lived.
Then we'll rebuild our government from the ground up.
Irish_Dem
(81,345 posts)I work on it and pray for it every day.
Silver Gaia
(5,363 posts)
rurallib
(64,688 posts)Last November I thin I had 20 from White House to local county commissioner. Give us ballots with one race and we can count them rickety-split also.
keepthemhonestO
(628 posts)If you don't hand count and take the time to do that then you don't get a Democracy.
You get more volunteers if you have more races.
LeftInTX
(34,317 posts)Morrell added that the discrepancies found in Gillespie and in Travis don’t typically occur in elections where voting equipment is used. Even in parts of the process where hand counting is used, such as audits or recounts (where only one or two races are counted rather than the entire ballot), “we find that it’s easy for people to make mistakes,” she said. And that’s especially true when tallying undervotes.
In Gillespie, the Republican Party has no intention of doing any sort of recount, Campbell said. Neither do Travis County Republicans, Mackowiak said.
Campbell stressed that each hand-counting team had a caller of the votes, a watcher to ensure the caller was correct, and three people writing down the totals. “If it didn’t match, they’d have to go back and count again,” he said. “You have three people. Three of them are not going to make the same error.”
https://www.texastribune.org/2024/03/19/texas-republican-hand-count-election/
slightlv
(7,790 posts)Happened in Florida, albeit a few different reasons... like badly designed ballots. But the end result is the oligarchs are not going to let us decide our government.
cadoman
(1,617 posts)Essentially zero knowledge of civics, what a state is, what voter registration is, what an amendment or bond is, the difference between primary and general elections, and lord knows they have no idea who any of the candidates are other than during presidential races. They frequently ask the poll workers to help them "finish" their ballot--as though it were math homework.
One thing the scanners do accomplish is they check a voter's ballot before they leave the polling place. It'll kick back any nuttiness they've impugned to the process and make them redo it. That extra check is lost during hand counting.
IMO scanners should continue to be used but in addition, a small # of randomized hand counts should be done to ensure the machines were configured correctly and performed accurately. Candidates should be allowed to pay to have hand recounts at the precinct level--which would expand election integrity checks at an affordable rate. If problems were found, a full recount would be performed at the county's expense.
LeftInTX
(34,317 posts)The few counties that have attempted the massive task have found the process more time-consuming, expensive and inaccurate than expected.
In rural Nye County in Nevada, where volunteers in 2022 embarked on an unprecedented full hand-count of midterm votes, mismatched tallies led to recount after recount. After the first day of counting, the county clerk, Mark Kampf, estimated a discrepancy of nearly 25% between the hand and machine count, attributing it to human counting error. The painstakingly slow process was halted by the state’s Supreme Court over concerns that early vote tallies could be leaked publicly.
Shasta County, a conservative rural county in northern California, last year abandoned plans to hand-count ballots after the plan was estimated to cost $1.6 million and require more than 1,200 additional employees.
https://apnews.com/article/hand-counts-ballots-voting-elections-93af22f5f7691e57b4a675a64c217627
Everything you want to know about converting is here:
trying to replace a modern voting system with a full hand count leads to significant obstacles for election officials as they conduct free, fair, and secure elections.
https://statesunited.org/resources/hand-counts/
Mark Kampf was determined to count the ballots by hand, lawsuit after lawsuit against him be damned. The year was 2022 and Kampf was the newly elected county clerk for Nye County, Nev., after campaigning on a platform that included adherence to the lie that the last presidential election had been stolen from Donald Trump. In Kampf’s mind, running a clean election meant not trusting the process used in 2020. So instead of using machines, Kampf was going to hand count 20,000 ballots in a week.
After two weeks of court battles that stretched past Election Day, Kampf finally had the go ahead to launch his team of hundreds of volunteers—mostly older residents who had the time to go through the arduous task of tabulating the results. They got through 2,500 ballots on that first day. But despite working in groups of three, as many as a quarter of the ballots had to be read a second time because of obvious errors.
Eventually, Kampf resorted to machines to complete the official count. Nye County’s folly is just one example of a pattern that is remarkably consistent: outside of the tiniest jurisdictions, hand counting is hard, slow, expensive, and highly unreliable. And if Kampf’s count of 1-in-4 ballots being read incorrectly is accurate, he actually did better than most. A study from Rice University estimated that hand counts got the results right just 58% of the time. Machine-based voting has an error rate of less than 1%, according to two decades of research.
https://time.com/7071959/election-2024-hand-count-ballots/
We have huge ballots in the US! If we only had one race, it would be different.
Gillespie County needed 200 people to count 8,000 ballots, but they likely needed 400 or 500. 140,000,000 ballots would require 7 million people. To get a scale of how it would be, our county would need to employ about 50,000 temporary workers to hand count ballots.
questionseverything
(11,846 posts)Precinct by precinct would be much easier
LeftInTX
(34,317 posts)We have 700 precincts. Our county also has county wide voting. (Gillespie did not for this particular primary) The Republicans ran the entire thing too, so they set all the rules. They even controlled early voting sites for the Republican primary. Our county has joint primaries.
We would need to eliminate county wide voting.
In order to count early votes, we need to have 700 early voting sites or not have it at all.
questionseverything
(11,846 posts)LeftInTX
(34,317 posts)You check in to any one of early voting sites or election day sites. You are then issued a ballot for your precinct. You don't need to vote in your precinct.
The USB sent to the elections dept will have voting from hundreds of precincts on it.
Igel
(37,541 posts)Let's say I'm a volunteer ballot counter.
I run through a list of 20 sets of votes and have a form next to me to keep some tally on. How easy is it to have my left hand slip as my right hand makes a tally mark on the other form or enters a number on a keypad?
Or maybe I'm just looking for ballot item 16 on a page and entering it--then instead of one person counting a ballot with just one option there needs to be 20 people. (And you're not going to get that many more volunteers.).
You recount just to be sure--so many places to make an error--and each recount introduces a different set of errors. Perhaps they all cancel out so you get a clean tally, perhaps they don't and you need a second round of recounting.
Now take one ballot I filled out a few years ago. Counted the things to vote for. 83.
Then there's the complexity that I can vote anywhere in the county. But the county contains a decent number of state legislative districts, judicial districts, federal House districts, along with local races. My ballot was different, quite likely, from most of those around me because I vote 15 miles from home. So my "line 19" wasn't line 19 for those around me--some of whom lived 15, 20 miles in the other direction from the polling place. Do they physically take my ballot to "my" precinct for counting? And if it's mis-sorted and sent 35 miles to the wrong counting place?
Yeah, that's not going to work. It's a nice idea until it crashes into reality in large population centers.
Ocelot II
(130,568 posts)In their federal elections they are voting for a representative and for the party controlling the Bundestag, which determines who gets to be Chancellor. In contrast, in the US in every federal election we are voting for a presidential ticket, a Senator for our state, a member of Congress for our district, plus a whole collection of state and local offices: A state senator, a state representative, a mayor, a city council representative, members of local elective bodies like a park board, a school board, water conservation district; referenda; state constitutional amendments, and a whole collection of judges. Each city or local government has its own ballot items, and the process of counting so many different ballots can't be done efficiently or accurately by hand. Of course Germany was able to count ballots with two items in a day. It's not so easy to do that with ballots with 20 or more items in thousands of jurisdictions.
slightlv
(7,790 posts)elections and voting are two aspects we're going to have to have major public input. We need a designated federal holiday (no matter how much it hurts corps to give us a day off with pay). Heck, it'd be really good to have 2 consecutive days off to vote. Mandatory voting, no matter what you look like or what you believe. Agree as to whether or not there must be ID, but if so, make it such that it is easy enough to prove. None of this going back years and years to gather the correct paperwork or $$$ out of pocket to get it. No making it so one-sided that women have a horrible time trying to prove who they are.
Everyone votes. No purging the rolls at the last minute. Set a specific time for purges to happen and make them be backed up by paper trails and proven reasons. No just willy-nilly because "someone says"...
Make it easier to vote. No more huge vs small areas to vote, depending on party. Set a size based on the largest number of voters in one county and carry it out across the country. Provide chairs for those of us who are disabled and can't handle standing for any length of time, and for the elderly. Provide helpers for the disabled who need them. The point is to *help* everyone vote. If a helper is used, make sure someone of the other party is there to validate the votes and that the original helper hasn't done his own thing with the ballot.
The one thing this all has in common is standards... country-wide standards. Right now, we have chaos each election because we have 50 states and 50 different slates of rules. Beyond that, you can have different standards between counties in the same state. The founders thought this would deny the chaos makers; instead, it has helped them kill democracy. The Founders were good men, but they were men, with all the blind spots and foibles of men. They weren't prescient. This is one they got wrong. There must be Federal standards for voting so we're all starting from a blank slate.
Ocelot II
(130,568 posts)of members of Congress. "The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations, except as to the Places of chusing Senators." Constitutional amendments and federal laws protecting voting rights have been passed since then, but the process is still managed by the states, and while Congress can "make or alter" a state's voting procedures, there is exactly zero chance that a bill could be passed that would do so to the satisfaction of all the states. And changing the procedure for the election of presidents would require a Constitutional amendment.
slightlv
(7,790 posts)And this is why I said Standards are going to be a major problem. But it's obvious we're going to have to have changes to the Constitution. While some things have held, others have fallen. I blame a good portion of this on the old English-speak of the Founders. Even those articles which have held through the onslaught need to written in modern day English so they cannot be "reinterpreted" by the courts.
Unfortunately, this will probably mean a Constitutional Convention will need to be convened. And here, we must be very careful and very intelligent. But I stand by what I say. If the Constitution weren't so effusive and elaborate in language, we might have been able to sidestep some of these issues. However, I do concede where even its present language seems to be damned straightforward, Courts have misinterpreted and reinterpreted according to their and their followers desires. Somehow, this has to be guarded against within a new Constitution.
Other countries have managed to rewrite their Mandates. I think surely we can do the same... again we need smart people and Historians to help guide us.
Blue_Roses
(13,881 posts)amended is that no one who has any felony convictions can be eligible to run for president. Along with so many other changes. You're right. The Constitution needs to be updated by people who understand what it actually entails and also people who have just plain common sense!
Tickle
(4,131 posts)who they want, felony or not.
Blue_Roses
(13,881 posts)Trump. Amendments are put in place to make things better and more sustainable.
Sogo
(7,195 posts)nt
questionseverything
(11,846 posts)LeftInTX
(34,317 posts)When you have 30, it gets complicated.
drray23
(8,787 posts)France also counts in a few hours for a country of 80 millions. It's broken down by small precints reporting up the chain.
We could easily do that if there was a will. It's just a matter of staffing local precints with enough people to count it in a few hours.
LeftInTX
(34,317 posts)Our county would need to hire 50,000 people to do the counting.
It would mean 70 workers per precinct.
Mountainguy
(2,145 posts)In 2021.
We don't need to hand count ballots. Machines have fewer errors than Human counters.
questionseverything
(11,846 posts)Electric systems are complicated sometimes, yes Biden still won by almost 12,000 votes but the hand count found many ballots
Mountainguy
(2,145 posts)They were never counted, which has nothing to do with machines and could happen during an initial hand count as well. It's why we have audits and recounts in close races.
questionseverything
(11,846 posts)The main thing is in a democracy citizens need to be able to oversee the counting of the votes not have to trust nameless, faceless shareholders of secret corporations (the makers of voting machines) to count the votes in secret
Igel
(37,541 posts)If it's a "miscount," then recounting by itself is the fix.
If it's "misplaced ballots", then recounting over and over until the paper itself disintegrates won't catch the problem because it's not an erroneous count but completing the initial count that's the problem.
Mislabeling the problem leads to proposing the wrong solution and results from mis-identifying the problem. When I worked polls in west New York state it was clear that we counted the votes by race at our polling place, 1 (R) and 1 (D) doing the reading out of the machine's results and another set of 1 (R) and 1 (D) writing them down. Each set of partisans verified that the read-out was correct and the jotting down was correct. We sealed the equipment--again, with a partisan balance between sealers and witnesses. One copy of the prelim results was posted on the polling place door before we left that night, another was hand carried to the elections office that night. The machines were transported to the office and the official audit was taken--again, multiple people verifying the accuracy of the read-out and of the transcription; the precinct-level results from the official audit were compared with the prelim results. Any discrepancy had to be accounted for--they'd first look at the poll books (this was 20 years back) to verify that the number of people who voted was correct per the machines, then they'd contact the poll workers at issue to resolve discrepancies.
It was hard for an erroneous number to slip through. That's the checks and audits. Multiple redundancies. Recounts ... They're to catch initial counting errors, nothing more.
Mountainguy
(2,145 posts)Are the ones who didn't feed the ballots. The machine didn't lose them.
Wiz Imp
(10,023 posts)We vote on Sunday
Citizens have an automatic right to vote, they don't have to register for voting
No excuse and no witness is needed to vote by mail
The number of seats in parliament for each party is determined by the total number of votes
The chancellor is elected by 50% +1 member of parliament = she is elected because her coalition won the national popular vote
The rules for federal elections are set on the federal level = the rules are the same for every citizen no matter in which state they live
Prisoners can vote
You don't have to be a German citizen at birth to become Germany's chancellor
There are several measures in place to decrease the dependency of parties on money from donors and lobbyists: German parties get subsidies from the government based on their election outcome. TV stations have to show free ads from political parties (the time is allocated based on election outcome). Parties can use the public space to set up their posters and billboards for free so they do not have to pay for advertising space. The donations to the CDU in the election year 2017 on federal, state and local level combined were 22.1 million euro (0.22 euro per inhabitant in Germany). Donald Trump/RNC and Joe Biden/DNC raised about $1.5 billion each until the first half of October ($4.6 per US inhabitant for each campaign) just on the federal level and just for the Presidential election.
Gerrymandering districts is not a thing because only the number of votes nationwide are relevant for the outcome of the election
Foreign citizens of the other 26 EU countries have the right to vote and be elected at all local elections
You are not allowed to take a ballot selfie
Voting machines are not allowed, you can only vote on paper and there will always be a paper trail to recount all votes
Elections are held on Sundays so (most) people don't have to take time off from work
IIRC there are rules about how many polling stations have to be set up in an area based on population to avoid long queues. I don't remember ever having to queue for more than ~5 minutes even in a fairly densely populated district of a large city.
you cast your vote at a ballot which is close to your home address; usually you can walk there.
you can vote "invalid". These votes are still counted and affect the other parties percentages. (It's better to vote invalid than to not vote)
Wiz Imp
(10,023 posts)You have two votes. The first vote (Erststimme) is for a person from your district. There are 299 election districts (Wahlkreise) with about the same number of eligible voters https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liste_der_Bundestagswahlkreise_2017
Each district elects one person into the federal parliament (the person who got the most votes).
Your second vote (Zweitstimme) determines how many of the 598 total seats in parliament each party gets on the national level. If one party gets 7 million votes and anther party gets 14 million votes then the second party will get exactly twice the number of total seats because they got twice the number of votes.
The seats are first filled with the 299 people who won their district. The remaining 299 seats are then filled from the list of candidates that the party provided.
The reason that ballots can be counted by hand very quickly is due to the presence of just 2 votes on the ballot. This would never work in the US. Each additional race causes the time & effort to count votes to rise exponentially. It is the same way throughout Europe. For the US to be able to hand count paper ballots would require separating each race into a different election with a different election day.
Note Germany does allow voting by mail
Also, while they can count the votes relatively quickly, they still have not finished counting the votes or released those numbers from Sunday's election yet. The results quoted in the media so far have been based on Exit Polls.
LeftInTX
(34,317 posts)Not gonna happen!
Igel
(37,541 posts)As for the # of polling machines, that's something that's widely discussed here in Houston.
There's a limited number of voting machines and polling locations. They compromise in how to distribute them in a given election between voter turnout in the last election at that location + how public opinion polls state the likely turnout for each community. If it's an election of great importance to Ethnic Group A but not Groups B-E or the communities Near the Bayou that Flooded Last Year but not other communities, for instance, they may put their thumb on the scale and send a few extra machines to Group A or "Near the Bayou" dense areas.
Have paper ballots, the number of polling places isn't limited by the amount of equipment. (But then counting's a nightmare.)
Magoo48
(6,721 posts)
Wild blueberry
(8,300 posts)Would be massively prone to human error. Would take days or weeks, and require hundreds of thousands more poll workers.
It is vital to have paper ballots, the gold standard for verification.
It's wonderful to have accurate machine tabulators (using paper ballots).
Our small town had to hand count the November 2024 election in December, as part of statewide audit. We were randomly chosen. It took four people four hours to count the 800-some ballots. Everything tallied 100%, but we had to re-count numerous times due to a one-vote difference that turned out to be human error during the audit.
Now consider doing this in, say, the city of Chicago. Do you want to hand count 2.5 million ballots?
LeftInTX
(34,317 posts)For 350 people for 8,000 ballots. I know it took them 8 hours initially, then they had numerous recounts because things were "off" and tallies weren't matching.
https://www.texastribune.org/2024/05/16/texas-election-hand-count-cost-gillespie-county/
MichMan
(17,160 posts)DetlefK
(16,670 posts)Germany has the "Law of Notification" (Meldegesetz) where you must provide the government with your legal address.
Voter-rolls are managed on a precinct-by-precinct basis, based on your address, each containing roughly 1000-2000 voters. You can only vote in your precinct.
As it is known in advance how many ballots there will be to count, it is easier to count by hand.