The answer to OP's question is... why have software at all? Why not just paper? Why do you want a 'voting machine' at all? What's wrong with paper?
The solution to a problem that should not be solved with software is not to have different software.
The solution to a problem that should not be solved with software is not to have different software.
I'm also trying to imagine elections with the number of people we have and number of races being counted by hand from the beginning, with no digital storage or tabulation, and it is rife with errors and even harder to validate in a reasonable way.
It’s not actually that hard at all, including validation, through simple physical processes (that are incredibly tried and tested!). Write the contents of the vote totals on the outside of the box containing the ballots (total must reconcile to number of ballots placed in), then total all the box totals at the end for a single constituency. Constituencies then report back.
We get results back within a day and the validity has never been seriously questioned. The process can easily scale linearly too.
What is not reflected however is the sheer number of votes that people tend to cast in the US - often voting on dozens of different measures.
The UK process does not have this aspect - at worst there may be a Westminster, country-specific parliament and city or town council on the same election day, and they are handled via separate ballot papers.
It’s literally an ‘embarrassingly parallel’ problem.
A hundred people can count ten times the ballots that ten people can, and then merge their results.
The first is that there are a lot of reduction steps where we're doing many to one communication. The more nodes you have the more communication there has to be and this is an issue.
The second issue is that if we (naively) assume that there's a consistent error at each step, that the error will grow in each gather step. So if each worker has a 0.5% error rate, each gather has a 0.5% error rate, then our error rate depends on the number of workers and gather steps.
For what it is worth there is at least a gather step at each poll station, then each precinct, then the state, and then the country. It is also likely that these all get worse as the election is closer and there's more pressure on.
US elections are also operated entirely regionally; the largest US election is that in California, which is smaller than the UK.
You have to look at the 2000 election[0] where there was a switch to digital means. I don't have exact numbers, but I am under the impression that these machines are easier to use and are less error prone than the previous punch card methods. Your digital machines can also print you a receipt. So "why have a (digital) voting machine at all" is because it is easier and less error prone. Having election results going to the Supreme Court is a pretty big deal and should be avoided.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000_United_States_presidentia...
I think you're trying to work your solution into being correct rather than recognizing that the problem itself is extremely complicated. Given your other comments and our other conversations it is clear that you're overly simplifying the subject matter and frankly you are wrong about certain aspects of it (like that all votes are counted the night of rather than "enough"). If you flat out ignore these parts of the problem then you're going to get the wrong result. You should also not start with a solution and work towards an explanation, but rather work the other way around. These conversations feel really disingenuous to be honest. They feel more like they are based on how the UK is so much better without any real justification.
Hanging chads? You even brought up the 2000 election in the US yourself. Pencil and paper (and no machines) would have avoided that mess.
In the general case, however, tabulating ballots via a scantron machine or similar seems reasonable.
With paper, it's 100% guaranteed that "No two recounts will ever be the same". It's a human process. Two humans verifying it will never come to the same conclusion. One will say the "ballot stamp was not in the right place", another will say "chad did not fall off the paper", someone else may just be tired in the night, so on and on. As a democratic society, we have had large cases of recounts that it's not even a surprise anymore. It has become the go to whining and agitation tool for losers.
For the continued functioning of democracy, we have to put an end to this recount problem. If a winner wins by 1 vote, it should recount to the same 1 vote difference no matter how many times you do it. If not, elections are undermined (and thus democracy).
As for the "voting machine", people in this forum are really not good for judging as they think in terms of "modern" tech software with C or Python with a running OS. Read this thread for more info [0].
A good way to describe the voting machine, is a dumb printer. It originally exists to print a proper valid ballot for the elector who then drops it off. The machine just so happens to also have a secondary counter in it while it prints, so it can be secondary verified for extra safety. The paper is what matters and it's still there. This is called VVPAT, Voter Verified Paper Audit Trail [1].
Over the course of time, after many many recounts, it becomes obvious that the machine-printed ballot and machine do not ever diverge. So it just so happens that for convenience, the machine has grown to get counted first. If anyone has a doubt, they can easily go back and verify the ballots which are stored forever. It has been proven over and over to give consistent recounts and restore trust in elections.
Trivia: First time a Cabinet-rank senator in India lost election by 1 vote [2]. Recounts tallied down to 1. It has happened again. Chaos still did not break out. Candidates were not fighting over who was the winner. Reason? Voting machines and verified ballots. Recounts won't change reality.
I'll finally leave you with the summary of an excellent video on elections in India before/after voting machines. Every loser will complain and blame something. Hacking the voting process, obstructionism, who's issued voter IDs, where and how many voting centers are placed, gerrymeandering, media, pre-mature leading polls, on and on and on. All this thing about Voting machines is a classic case of shooting the messenger. The voting machine only exists to give one less reason to blame on. Don't shoot the messenger [3].
0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25106044
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter-verified_paper_audit_tra...
But this is basically what your [1] is, which got cut off.
/wiki/Voter-verified_paper_audit_trail
And yes, the voting machines have evolved to deal with that as well. Now, the printed paper is clearly displayed, the citizen looks at it and then they press OK if it's fine, and it falls straight into the ballot box. A bit easier :)
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter-verified_paper_audit_tra...
[2] That is an interesting solution but I don't think solves the problem. How does the voter know that their receipt matches the one in the bottom compartment? I can's speak Hindi so maybe they verbally addressed this issue but it wasn't apparent from the visuals alone.
I'm not sure myself, just asking. I don't know the sound or experience of dropping ballots into a box, since (for good or bad) paper ballots were already extinct when I started to vote...
Before the first step happens, expecting the next steps would be premature I guess.
But reality is: The printed paper shown to the voter has to go somewhere. It cannot disappear or be hidden in the machine in secret compartments because the paper is in the mechanical side of things, not software. Such hidden compartments will not fall invisible to officials on the ground. It's not a black box machine in that sense, officials run basic physical and mechanical tests on it before voting happens. The machine is dumb and tiny.
I still understand your point about "anything can be hacked", but at this point, to hide something in physical sight needs on the ground support (which can happen regardless of machines), or needs discrete parts like a shredder which will make it mechanically huge and does not go unnoticed by such a large chain of command.
Three, surely, by that metric? 2016 was closer than 2020.
I agree that paper ballots are ideal, but the machines are already in use.
They aren't inefficient. In the UK (paper ballots) an accurate estimate is available when the polls close, and a certain result is available within a few hours before next morning. This is much faster than US voting machines.
1. You didn't have to count 151 million votes in the UK election
2. You didn't have to wait a few days for mail-in ballots that were delayed in transit to arrive
3. You didn't have to do this in the middle of a global pandemic that required poll workers to stay 6 feet apart
Generally the US election results can be predicted the same day, this year had additional challenges due to extremely high turn-out, high use of mail-in ballots, and limited number of pool workers due to pandemic.
In my opinion, elections should be done using paper ballots, and those ballots are counted using electronic tabulation machines. After a batch of ballots are counted, a random sample of them are selected and manually counted. Should the results match, then you can have a high certainty of the accuracy of the count. Electronic tabulation machines are actually more accurate than hand-counting, and by hand counting again, you reduce the risk of the machines making "mistakes" due to technical glitches or malicious backdoors etc.
[Edited to add: 46 states have a lower population density than the UK, adding further logistical consideration]
If each community counts their votes... why does it matter how large an area they collectively cover?
St Ives constituency in the UK is generally the last to declare, presumably because the island populations are so small and remote it's considered unsafe for them to individually count and report the results for collation, for multiple potential reasons (Gugh: 3 residents)
Why is it about the US that means it takes a week... even with these machines which supposedly make it better?
If your count in the UK doesn't finish for a week, the parliamentary session opens, and you don't have local representation in parliament. There's an immediate procedural consequence that disadvantages the local area and may result in concentrated unrest.
If your count in the US doesn't finish, the relevant [Congressional] term doesn't start until January 3rd, 2021. As such, there's no immediately comparable procedural consequence.
The Electoral College doesn't cast its votes until December 14th.
The Supreme Court won't get involved, to hurry you up, until December 8th.
Correctly postmarked ballots will (in some states) still be counted if they arrive late, up to November 23rd.
Today is still November 15th. In theory, not all the votes have even arrived to be counted yet.
The US is vast. The political geography is different because the physical geography is different.
In US there were some laws that counting couldn't start before polls are closed. Despite mail in ballots arriving a month earlier. In some places they weren't even allowed to prepare them for counting (like verifying signatures and removing ballots from envelopes).
This is a good time to remind everyone that in the U.S. there are many different voting jurisdictions, and at the very least 50 different sets of rules. Some similar, some not. So it's difficult to generalize, some places count early, some not, some allow late arrivals, some not, etc.
That's actually pretty much on par for much of the U.S. We have paper ballots and results mostly finished before the next morning. There are stragglers, of course, for good reasons, but you don't really hear much about those unless they are possibly going to decide the election, like this year.
And then of course 2020 is it's own special kind of fun, not typical of any other year.
This year, my ballot had about a dozen individual races (including two state referendums and an advisory question) to vote on, and this is probably about or below the US median ballot complexity each presidential election.
But can you not return a presidential result in the first few hours, and then go back in priority order?
With electronic voting, the bar for being able to validate vote counts is raised to requiring computer experts who understand public-key encryption.
With paper ballots, anyone who can count is able to validate votes.
Electronic voting would be prime for obfuscated attempts at influencing elections because only a handful of people would be able to verify that the machines counted votes correctly.
All these phishing schemes that are extremely effective with IT workers and other security conscious people. I say just keep elections analog for the time being. Perhaps someday the technology will be mature, well understood, and distributed far enough to work but I don't see it happening this decade.
I agree with this - in addition, it makes it a lot easier for everyone to understand the system, and therefore more likely to trust it.
Is this the USA system we are talking about? Because a significant proportion don’t seem to understand or trust the system right now!
I would be happy if we could have a national popular vote to choose the president, that reduces complexity. I'm wary of anything more, though I do like that there are now some experiments here and there with other systems.
Edit: I've recently come to the conclusion that the real value of elections is as a national show of force.
"1xx,000,000 of us are here and paying attention and expecting the government to respond to our interests and willing to do something about it"
I'm extremely confused by this statement. All the systems the parent is talking about still use plurality. Substituting in another voting method doesn't change the fact that each state works slightly differently (and really every county).
I'd also say that if this was your goal then you'd want something besides plurality. RCV/IRV would probably be good because it is highly inefficient because you have to do many different rounds whereas systems like plurality and condorcet (exception to STAR, which has 2 rounds) are single round methods.
I should mention Ireland and Australia does hand counting with IRV (Australia has had IRV for 100+ years). I don't think the hand counting is really a major factor, though I will still contend that ordinal systems are needlessly complicated when we have cardinal systems available to us (which also give higher fidelity).
As for part more information Clay (who might be in this thread somewhere?) put out a pretty good video on voting methods and towards the end he shows a sample of an Oakland Mayoral result that used IRV[0] (around 15:20). It isn't too useful in isolation but I do encourage watching the whole thing because it is from someone who is a HN member and an expert on voting.