Not necessarily. Germany uses just pens and paper ballots for the election and has fairly trustworthy results. We can typically call the vote after six to eight hours, with the last votes being counted within twelve.
We do that by requiring all parties that are electable in a region to send representatives to the polling places. After voting ends, all ballots are taken to a backroom and divided into stacks. Each party representative tallies the votes in one stack, than passes the stack on to another party’s representative. They tally the stack as well; if any discrepancies are found the stack is passed on to another representative and so on. Once all ballots have been tallied and everyone agrees that the count is accurate, the ballots are put into sealed containers for secure transport to the election commission and the tally is reported to them electronically. The whole process is open to public inspection so if you want to watch people count votes for eight hours on a Sunday night you can.
Since the count is parallelized over all polling places and over all parties within each polling place we can get authoritative results within hours. Typically, voting ends at 18:00 and the results are clear enough to call the election at around 22:00, with the last tallies coming in at around 02:00. There is no debate about manipulated voting machines because there aren’t any voting machines. And since the parties check each others# results during the count it’s assumed that the tally is fairly accurate.
Of course that only works if you have enough parties to matter; with two parties and a talking spoiler effect you’re not going to be as fast. Oh, and in Germany polling places are only allowed to serve a certain number of voters by law; if there are too many voters and additional polling place has to be created. Of course that doesn’t mesh with the American voting district system at all.
In general the US is able to call elections within a day. I think there are a variety of factors that make it seem like it takes longer than other places though. The US has arguably 6+ time zones, so voting may end in one place hours after another place has already counted the votes. As you mentioned, in the US there’s a variable number of voters being covered be polling stations and as of late there’s been several efforts to exacerbate that problem. We also have a rule that if you’re in line you get to vote. There have been times where lines are hours long, and that obviously can cause delays if you have a lot of people still in line even though polling has technically closed. Additionally, mail in ballots are often allowed to be posted the day of the election, so your vote might not be counted until several days after the election.
There are of course some races that are very close and recounts are requested, but really we’re not as disorganized as the republicans would like people to believe. The “official” tally is delayed in order to ensure that people have time to question the process if needed, but that’s not a bug, it’s a feature of the system. People can definitely disagree with the system, but the Republicans acting like the delay is a problem is explicitly meant to undermine credibility for no reason among people who just don’t understand how it works.
Most votes in the USA are counted nearly immediately. By the end of the evening, we have a pretty clear picture of the in-person votes.
The issue is the mail-in votes. Some states end their mail-on votes a week or so before Election Day, so they are all in. Other states, like California, allow mail-ins to be posted on Election Day, which means they might not arrive to be counted for a week, holding up the process.
I’m not big on most of these “reforms” to the voting process that MAGA wants, I understand what their true agenda is, but it makes sense to demand that the mail-in votes arrive by Election Day. That’s a sensible change that would help the entire situation, and keep MAGA loudmouths quiet. It’s not a good system when we’re still waiting on a result a week after the election, especially when we’re mostly waiting on a giant state like California, while we have to listen to MAGAs torture the world with their incessant whining.
Yea, I agree that we know almost immediately, I was just explaining the reason it might not seem that way. Hearing that polls closed in Florida only to know that other place have hours left can be confusing if people don’t understand how many time zones are involved. It makes people think that some states are taking the extra time to mess with votes when in reality they are just in a different time zone.
I don’t think anything will keep maga quiet and attempting to do anything to appease them will just result in them moving the goalposts and then once they hit a final barrier they will claim they reason you’re unwilling this time is because this is where the stealing is really happening. It’s a losing battle and we shouldn’t play.
I don’t think voting by mail should mean they have less time or less knowledge than anyone else in their area. If something scandalous happens the day before the election you have essentially robbed them of legally being able to vote with that information. Those who vote early are exercising their right, but were likely not forced to do so, so they are at fault if they regret it later. Obviously you have to make concessions for time zones etc, but I disagree that they should have less time than their fellow constituents. I know places do things differently, but that’s my personal opinion. I think realistically these mail in votes are not holding much up, especially since the effects of the elections are months out, and a lot of it really is the certification process that varies.
That’s a reasonable change. I definitely would encourage a reform of the voting district system, though. There is no reason for districts to exist or matter nowadays and they can be replaced by a fairly simple set of rules regarding how far polling places can be away from voters and how many there must be per X voters in the area.
Why does it matter really if the results are in before November ends when they have all of December to prepare for an office they enter in January. In person voting from Nov 1st-30th should be fine. End the mail ins by the 15th or something and there shouldn’t be an issue.
Canada does the same. Paper is extremely hard to scale an attack against and the best electronic voting machines are basically gigantic million dollar pens.
Our method is a bit different. I worked a federal election when i was 18 and each booklet had ballots counted against the stubs. Each booklet had a serial number we had to verify against and requesting more was a whole procedure. Me and the other poll worker each counted our stack and swapped. Each party had an observer there and while we didnt need to recount i think they could requestcit if they wanted?
We have something very similar in Chile. But instead of each party representatives counting votes separately, the person that was responsible for each voting “table”, shows each vote to the party representatives (put it in front of him/her like someone showing which card he/him took from the magician 😄), and other person marks the vote on a whiteboard that everyones also sees.
At the end the process takes a similar duration, and TV channels show different voting tables in real time as they publicly count votes.
With these methods is practically impossible to rig elections and the results are very fast. What USians do is nuts, leaving some single entity count votes behind close doors? And those votes aren’t even what defines the elected president?
Yup! I did this in the previous Canadian Federal election. Open the box, show every ballot to the people gathered around, report my total, everyone agrees that was the total they got, call it in. Box and my tally gets sealed up and mailed to HQ, and my results were in about an hour after polls closed. Some people told me as I was handing them their ballot they they didn’t trust the voting machines and I got to be like “well, good news! I’m the voting machine! Let me tell you exactly how your vote is going to get counted”
Anyway, I heard this past election is the past to use this system and they’re moving to electronic vote counting next time 😅
I work in tech and actually loved the transparency and accountability of the paper ballot system.
Now! The electronic system will still be paper ballots, it’s just that those ballots pass through a scanner on their way into the ballot box that does the counting, so it’s basically the same system, it’s just that we have the tally as soon as the polls close.
But I liked the system where one person, me, was responsible for the number and has stewardship of the whole process. In theory someone should count the ballots anyway to check the number the counting machine got, but if it’s me then what’s the benefit of the machine if I’m going to count anyway, but if it’s a “maybe we’ll check some of them” process at HQ then we lose the local visibility and responsibility.
I think the paper worked pretty okay. The slowest part of the process for voters is handing out ballots and marking registered voters off the register, and not the counting, and the counting machine doesn’t change that part…
Not necessarily. Germany uses just pens and paper ballots for the election and has fairly trustworthy results. We can typically call the vote after six to eight hours, with the last votes being counted within twelve.
We do that by requiring all parties that are electable in a region to send representatives to the polling places. After voting ends, all ballots are taken to a backroom and divided into stacks. Each party representative tallies the votes in one stack, than passes the stack on to another party’s representative. They tally the stack as well; if any discrepancies are found the stack is passed on to another representative and so on. Once all ballots have been tallied and everyone agrees that the count is accurate, the ballots are put into sealed containers for secure transport to the election commission and the tally is reported to them electronically. The whole process is open to public inspection so if you want to watch people count votes for eight hours on a Sunday night you can.
Since the count is parallelized over all polling places and over all parties within each polling place we can get authoritative results within hours. Typically, voting ends at 18:00 and the results are clear enough to call the election at around 22:00, with the last tallies coming in at around 02:00. There is no debate about manipulated voting machines because there aren’t any voting machines. And since the parties check each others# results during the count it’s assumed that the tally is fairly accurate.
Of course that only works if you have enough parties to matter; with two parties and a talking spoiler effect you’re not going to be as fast. Oh, and in Germany polling places are only allowed to serve a certain number of voters by law; if there are too many voters and additional polling place has to be created. Of course that doesn’t mesh with the American voting district system at all.
In general the US is able to call elections within a day. I think there are a variety of factors that make it seem like it takes longer than other places though. The US has arguably 6+ time zones, so voting may end in one place hours after another place has already counted the votes. As you mentioned, in the US there’s a variable number of voters being covered be polling stations and as of late there’s been several efforts to exacerbate that problem. We also have a rule that if you’re in line you get to vote. There have been times where lines are hours long, and that obviously can cause delays if you have a lot of people still in line even though polling has technically closed. Additionally, mail in ballots are often allowed to be posted the day of the election, so your vote might not be counted until several days after the election.
There are of course some races that are very close and recounts are requested, but really we’re not as disorganized as the republicans would like people to believe. The “official” tally is delayed in order to ensure that people have time to question the process if needed, but that’s not a bug, it’s a feature of the system. People can definitely disagree with the system, but the Republicans acting like the delay is a problem is explicitly meant to undermine credibility for no reason among people who just don’t understand how it works.
Most votes in the USA are counted nearly immediately. By the end of the evening, we have a pretty clear picture of the in-person votes.
The issue is the mail-in votes. Some states end their mail-on votes a week or so before Election Day, so they are all in. Other states, like California, allow mail-ins to be posted on Election Day, which means they might not arrive to be counted for a week, holding up the process.
I’m not big on most of these “reforms” to the voting process that MAGA wants, I understand what their true agenda is, but it makes sense to demand that the mail-in votes arrive by Election Day. That’s a sensible change that would help the entire situation, and keep MAGA loudmouths quiet. It’s not a good system when we’re still waiting on a result a week after the election, especially when we’re mostly waiting on a giant state like California, while we have to listen to MAGAs torture the world with their incessant whining.
Yea, I agree that we know almost immediately, I was just explaining the reason it might not seem that way. Hearing that polls closed in Florida only to know that other place have hours left can be confusing if people don’t understand how many time zones are involved. It makes people think that some states are taking the extra time to mess with votes when in reality they are just in a different time zone.
The delay is not exclusively with mail in votes though. Certification does not happen immediately and this varies by location. Here’s a list of the rules: https://www.ncsl.org/elections-and-campaigns/election-certification-deadlines
I don’t think anything will keep maga quiet and attempting to do anything to appease them will just result in them moving the goalposts and then once they hit a final barrier they will claim they reason you’re unwilling this time is because this is where the stealing is really happening. It’s a losing battle and we shouldn’t play.
I don’t think voting by mail should mean they have less time or less knowledge than anyone else in their area. If something scandalous happens the day before the election you have essentially robbed them of legally being able to vote with that information. Those who vote early are exercising their right, but were likely not forced to do so, so they are at fault if they regret it later. Obviously you have to make concessions for time zones etc, but I disagree that they should have less time than their fellow constituents. I know places do things differently, but that’s my personal opinion. I think realistically these mail in votes are not holding much up, especially since the effects of the elections are months out, and a lot of it really is the certification process that varies.
That’s a reasonable change. I definitely would encourage a reform of the voting district system, though. There is no reason for districts to exist or matter nowadays and they can be replaced by a fairly simple set of rules regarding how far polling places can be away from voters and how many there must be per X voters in the area.
Why does it matter really if the results are in before November ends when they have all of December to prepare for an office they enter in January. In person voting from Nov 1st-30th should be fine. End the mail ins by the 15th or something and there shouldn’t be an issue.
Transparency, mainly. If the results are clearly available there’s less opportunity to create confusion about them. But yeah, it’d be a minor change.
Canada does the same. Paper is extremely hard to scale an attack against and the best electronic voting machines are basically gigantic million dollar pens.
Our method is a bit different. I worked a federal election when i was 18 and each booklet had ballots counted against the stubs. Each booklet had a serial number we had to verify against and requesting more was a whole procedure. Me and the other poll worker each counted our stack and swapped. Each party had an observer there and while we didnt need to recount i think they could requestcit if they wanted?
Relevant Tom Scott video on why electronic voting is a terrible idea and will always be a terrible idea
That’s sick
We have something very similar in Chile. But instead of each party representatives counting votes separately, the person that was responsible for each voting “table”, shows each vote to the party representatives (put it in front of him/her like someone showing which card he/him took from the magician 😄), and other person marks the vote on a whiteboard that everyones also sees.
At the end the process takes a similar duration, and TV channels show different voting tables in real time as they publicly count votes.
With these methods is practically impossible to rig elections and the results are very fast. What USians do is nuts, leaving some single entity count votes behind close doors? And those votes aren’t even what defines the elected president?
Yup! I did this in the previous Canadian Federal election. Open the box, show every ballot to the people gathered around, report my total, everyone agrees that was the total they got, call it in. Box and my tally gets sealed up and mailed to HQ, and my results were in about an hour after polls closed. Some people told me as I was handing them their ballot they they didn’t trust the voting machines and I got to be like “well, good news! I’m the voting machine! Let me tell you exactly how your vote is going to get counted”
Anyway, I heard this past election is the past to use this system and they’re moving to electronic vote counting next time 😅
I work in tech and actually loved the transparency and accountability of the paper ballot system.
Now! The electronic system will still be paper ballots, it’s just that those ballots pass through a scanner on their way into the ballot box that does the counting, so it’s basically the same system, it’s just that we have the tally as soon as the polls close.
But I liked the system where one person, me, was responsible for the number and has stewardship of the whole process. In theory someone should count the ballots anyway to check the number the counting machine got, but if it’s me then what’s the benefit of the machine if I’m going to count anyway, but if it’s a “maybe we’ll check some of them” process at HQ then we lose the local visibility and responsibility.
I think the paper worked pretty okay. The slowest part of the process for voters is handing out ballots and marking registered voters off the register, and not the counting, and the counting machine doesn’t change that part…
Dont even need a pen to vote in France and the results come a few hours after voting end
Since when are votes counted by representatives of the parties?
At least where i live(d) its always been people from the general public, not specifically sent by any party that can be voted.
Do you have any sources for that, I’d be interested how and why this happens.
Usually you would just make administrative staff do it, if there are not enough people willing to do it.