[recursivecaveat]

I never understood the desire to have any kind of machine at all. Paper ballots are a perfectly efficient and scalable system used for many large elections. Even if complicated machines are theoretically safe against malfeasance, keeping it simple increases public confidence.

[unethical_ban]

Scalable? Not for same-day. I'd be fine waiting a few days if needed, though. Heck, early voting means I wait for weeks now.

Ranked choice voting is essentially doing multiple elections at a time, having to recount portions of votes every time a candidate drops out. That's a lot easier with computers.

I think the totals from every precinct could be made public in a way that they are verifiable from a central database, where the numbers add up to the total for the state and eventually federal count.

This is probably already happening, but people don't seem to think so.

[bpye]

The UK manages to produce results within a few hours and all ballots, at least for general elections, are hand counted.

I agree that for voting systems other than FPTP it is more work and may take longer - but it’s not an intractable problem.

[wreckdropibex]

Same-day? It is not a problem at all. For example Finland calculates enough paper ballots in hours to give a definitive result, I am sure there are other countries that manage it as well. Your imagination is stuck in the world of voting practices of your side of the pond.

[crooked-v]

In the case of India, keep in mind that the country still has a significant illiteracy rate (about 20% as of 2018) and plenty of people who have literally never used a paper form in their lives. One of the key design goals of the machines is to try and reduce the education needed as much as possible while still keeping things more private and efficient than voice votes.

[cafard]

I should say, the speed of tabulation. An American election can include ballot lines for president, senator, member of congress, state senator, three state representatives, a county councilmember or two, a member of the board of education etc.

[anon291]

If the speed of tabulation is the main reason then why are results no longer known by election night? They're saying it might be days again. When we had paper ballots, we knew that night. (For America)

[gruez]

>When we had paper ballots, we knew that night. (For America)

You forgot about 2000. Also, the main reason for the delays are mail-in ballots, which could be delayed for days/weeks, depending on how lenient the deadlines are.

[chrisco255]

2000 was punch cards and it came down to a razor thin 500 votes in a single swing state.

By law the mail-in ballots have to be in by election day.

[Am4TIfIsER0ppos]

More bits of paper. The ballot papers around here are bloated oversize monstrosities (picture A3 sized) due to the number of parties and candidates but you get a separate one for each election. Unfortunately not every area is paper only.

[Ekaros]

Here we don't even put names on the ballot, instead there is number assigned for each, this scales up to hundreds of candidates. This does prevent write ins, but I see no reason why you could not have own ballot for each purpose and then say colour code them and append letter or two in front of each candidate for each election.

[erik_seaberg]

I don't see how the median voter can be confident in making no mistakes. Not even programmers are willing to write out a list of opcodes anymore.

[samarthr1]

Scale is a bit of an issue.

We need results in as short a time as possible, ws have about 100 crore registered voters, of whom about 70% on average vote, meaning that the ECI must process 70 Crore votes, in under 10 hours.

Making that happen in a free and fair way is a logistical challenge, one that we undertake every 5 years.

One more large advantage of EVMs is making booth capture very expensive (because EVMs have a inbuilt rate limit, but a ballot box does not).

At any rate, with VVPAT being there, it adds another layer of security.

[echoangle]

For everyone wondering: 100 crore is 1 billion, 70 crore is 700 million.

Why do you need the result in under 10 hours?

[jfengel]

Tell me you're under 24 years old without telling me you're under 24 years old.

The US 2000 election was a fiasco of the failures of paper ballots. Officials spent weeks scrutinizing ballots and to this day nobody thinks they got it correct to within the margin of error.

That's when electronic machines came in. They are not necessarily better, but nobody who lived through that nightmare thinks fondly of the clarity of paper ballots.

[rcxdude]

That was punch-card ballots, which are also crap. Most of Europe uses a piece of paper you mark with an 'X' in pen or pencil.

[SoftTalker]

Those were punch card ballots and trying to determine if indented or “hanging chads” were votes or not

[bigstrat2003]

> They are not necessarily better, but nobody who lived through that nightmare thinks fondly of the clarity of paper ballots.

I lived through that, it wasn't that big a deal, and I still think fondly of the clarity of paper ballots. No system is perfect, but paper ballots work and work well.