Bruce Schneier thinks that the best compromise is to to have paper ballots that can be counted by a machine or by hand. If all observers agree the vote was right, machine count stands. If someone challenges the vote, you count by hand.
Because Iowa chose to have a caucus, not a primary.
If you’re not an Iowa voter, there are a million political bikesheds that would have more relevance to your life. You’re basically just complaining about the pace of a television program.
That being said, it is an excellent way to exclude people who have other responsibilities or difficulty making it out for several hours on a week night.
Make a nice formatted layout specific to that year. People feel pretty comfortable in excel-like spreadsheets/forms.
Then at the state level, since you have permission to all the sheets, its simple to aggregates all the sheet data
It's not some wiz-bang branded app with fancy animations, but its piggybacking on a very robust spreadsheet system that many people have some experience/intuition with.
Early reports on the radio mentioned that people trying to call in and relay the results were waiting ages on hold, but they also said that the reason phones were so heavily used was that the app was giving inconsistent results. I never heard any more about what that could mean exactly.
Many of the caucus sites don't have good enough cell reception to download an app at the last minute. Imagine yourself arriving at a location with poor cell reception, told to download someone else's unknown code onto your personal phone using a weak or nonexistent cellular data signal. Problematic to say the least. Finally, the next day the Internet calls you "old people" as a final slap in the face.
I guess that’s the part I don’t understand very well. Does that mean the number of delegates didn’t match what the math said they should based on the final voting counts? Or does it mean some of the folks who used the app to report the counts also called in with different numbers? Or something else?
As of last night, that was unclear. I’m hoping that they do a whole post-mortem on what went wrong and how they resolved it.
I'd don't know whether it's hard inconsistencies (e.g., delegate counts not right given second alignment totals) or just improbable combinations that call for manual review out of caution (e.g., second alignment numbers that are technically possible but improbable given the first alignment) or a mix.
It was.
> My guess is that the round-to-round numbers didn't match expectations, and my guess-the-second is that more people leave between rounds than we realized.
They diagnosed the problem to the reporting functionality in the app not including all data in all reports, not unexpected results in the actual logged data.
EDIT: And if someone wants to fill out a paper ballot manually, let them. Just have a few spares around, most people won't.
Big friendly, easy to use touch screen, it then prints your ballot on paper, in big friendly easy to read lettering. You then feed that into another machine. There's the e-voting, as well as paper ballot paper trail.
This is a solved problem. In my precinct in Virginia, any mark inside the bubble counts as valid. If you accidentally put a stray mark in one selection and intentionally fill in another for a single-choice contest, the scanner machine will reject your ballot and notify the poll worker about your overvote. If you marked outside the bubble, the machine will reject your ballot as an undervote.
Election results are too important to risk compromising them by trying to save money or rush results.
The money saved is always marginal anyway and the extra time is usually only a few hours.