Paper ballots are best! Ontario election: 11mn votes, results in 1 hour!

Ontario's just finished elections are an excellent case study of the superiority of paper ballots to computers:
from xymphora blog:

The boring Canadian province of Ontario had an election yesterday, and the voters finally managed to kick out the right-wing American-influenced tax cutters, replacing them with a party whose main promise was that it would not cut taxes so that it would have enough money to pay for things considered inessential by the previous government, such as health care, education, public security and safety, and the electricity supply. A little sanity in an insane world. The interesting thing is the mechanics of the voting procedure. The election used paper ballots which were counted by hand at each polling station, with the results telephoned in to the Returning Officers, who communicated the results to the media. Ontario is a huge place, with over 11 million people on 415,000 square miles or over one million square kilometers (at the longest points, 1,000 miles high and 1,000 miles wide), and yet this old-fashioned system produced election results in about an hour, with the winner giving his victory speech less than two hours after the polls closed. Since paper ballots were used, and absolutely no computers were involved in the balloting process, the ballots can be recounted at any time should there be any dispute, and the ballots themselves serve as decisive evidence of the validity of the results. When I look at computer voting, I see a system which is in every possible way inferior to the paper ballot system:
<snip>
http://www.xymphora.blogspot.com/#106516635608139568

.......errr, well ummmm, uhhh, nevermind! :evilgrin:

Thanks for posting this! :)

Thanks for the laugh, it felt really good to see some humour!

It takes some of our election officials longer than that to count how many memory cards are missing! x(

:kick:

Ya know, we've got plenty of unemployed people available to count ballots. :think:

thanks for this timely reminder...

wow, cool.

In Canada there is only ONE mark on the ballot! There is a list of canadidates (some ridings as few as 3 names)...

It's a no brainer counting and in fact an electronic balloting system would be a sorry waste of money

American elections run everything from the President on down to dogcatcher, but any and all initiatives and referenda.

I have been to Toronto to view the process for elections in Ontario and I must point out some details...

1. There are many computers involved in collecting the data. They are found in Toronto in a locked room that no one is allowed to be inside. Even on non election days, no one is allowed to observe the set up.

2. The Provincial elections are for the MPs. It is a simple ballot that even the blind can vote on paper because the blind sticks the paper in a holder and feels for the openings to mark their ballot. Imagine doing this for a simple local municipal ballot like in the Northeasy which can have 20 offices. How about in Connecticut where they have ballots like "Vote for any 42"?

3. Ontario used to have voter registration by having a canvas of all neighborhoods prior to voting where the election official came to the people to register them on paper. Now they are going to electronic registration where manipulations like Florida will be possible in the future.

4. Since parlimentary elections are not set in stone (the election is called within 56 days), they couldn't deal with the management of a voting machine. The time and cost to distribute the ballot to machines located all over the province is not practical in that short of a time.

5. In Canada, you can have someone else vote for you. It is called a proxy vote. Imagine having that in this country?

These are a few things I remember on this subject. I think this falls in the apples to oranges category. The aforementioned Connecticut election used paper since their lever machine couldn't handle the load and they were counting until 2 am!

Have fun...

and they work just fine. They are still paper ballots and are counted in a timely manner. If there are more than one ballot to count, say there are local initiatives as well, just get more counters.

There are two issues with hand counting...

In this country, there is a shortage of workers. Those that work are demanding more pay as well. There are few volunteers here.

Hand counting the last general election can be as much as 40 contests for one ballot style. If the polling place only has 5 machines with 250 voters each it would take 13.9 hours straight to count these votes (at one contest a second)! That 13.9 hours is with no breaks or miscounts. So you say have 14 people count for two hours? Well you need to have at least two observers for each count so you have 42 people in this one precinct. Mulitply this by 250 precincts for a medium sized county and you need 10,500 people for this county. Good luck finding them.

Thanks for the math lesson... I never thought about this before.

counters $10 per hour to count?

The observers could be third party volunteers or senior citizens.

3,500 * 2 hours * $10 = $70,000 per county

That's a lot less than the annual support contract on 1,250 fraud-made-easy voting machines.

We pay our poll workers too and our scrutineers are from each of the parties or person's campaigns so each candidate has someone there to ensure an accurate count. The scrutineers are voluntary.

Love it.

The party scrutineers are there to ensure there is no 'cheating' and register objections...
BUT they spend most of their time, monitoring the voter list with the party list and reporting back to headquarters to 'whip' the district as the election day shortens...
It is one of the world's most boring volunteer jobs!!!

But it IS democracy at it's grassroots for sure!

Another great thing about having lots of people helping out in the community -- between Elections Canada and the provincial elections agencies, there's a broad base of expertise to call on, for NGOs who are supervising elections in other countries.

And there's a terrific sense of community too. Witness the recent vote in PEI, without electrical power -- people marking their ballots, and the scrutineers counting them, by flashlight and kerosene lamps.

than the computerized systems that are being foisted and forced upon us here. The rest of the article I cite above gives good reasons, and of course there is the entire book that Bev Harris has just come out with.

In NY we use mechanical voting machines, with levers, and I actually do like them, but if we have to get rid of them I'd much prefer paper, regardless of how troublesome it is, it is a whole lot cheaper than those computers, and given the budget disasters I think we need to prioritize. Plus the question of fraud, all adds up for me to prefer paper ballots to computerized systems.

Welcome to DU!! :toast:

really postive story, Thanks!

60 seats, props, etc? 60 ballots! Hand people a little well-perfed color-coded booklet, let them go to it.