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by the_snooze 2136 days ago
How many contests do you have on your ballot? Here's a sample ballot from Alameda County, California in 2018 (starting on page 12 going to page 25). That wasn't a presidential year, so this is a bit on the low side. https://www.acgov.org/rovapps/vig/236/38.pdf

Manual counts aren't practical in the US because our ballots can be crazy long with tons of contests and candidates. It would be very error-prone to do this manually.
1 comments
throwaway936482 2136 days ago
1. If there is more than 1 contest going on at a time you have more than 1 ballot. Again this is a simple solution to a dumb problem, you have poorly designed ballots.
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the_snooze 2136 days ago
The ballots are designed to accomodate the governments we have in place. We can't easily change the structure of national, state, and local governments. In California, one-ballot-per-contest would mean a voter would get a stack of up to 75 ballots on a presidential year.
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throwaway936482 2136 days ago
Whereas currently they get a multi page document. Seriously, as logistical problems go, print separate ballots is really not a hard one and would cut down on the number if people who accidentally vote for the wrong candidate for the wrong thing. Counting may take longer. It may stretch over a few days. Well, fine. Count the presidential ballots first, announce the results and move on down the list until you get to the dog catcher.
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the_snooze 2136 days ago
I'm not sure then what urgent problem you're trying to solve that warrants the cost of errors introduced by the manual counting of huge amounts of paper ballots. It would also be a logistical nightmare getting reams of paper to voters and getting them back and tracking them; at my polling place, we have to make sure that the number of ballots we issued out equals the number reported by the scanner (plus the number of spoiled ballots voters returned to us for disposal). I'm just pointing out that cost.

If you don't trust the tabulating machines, we have mechanisms to check them at scale. Basically, randomly sample the paper ballots and check them against the machine results. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Risk-limiting_audit

If you don't trust the people running elections, you should know that polling places in the US are run by community volunteers. Literally anyone who's a registered voter can participate and see how the sausage is made. In fact, there's a shortage of these folks, so boards of election are thrilled to get more people participating.

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