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Comment by h1srf | Hacker News Reader

It's not that simple.

In the US, I think most places let you write in whoever you want. If they get enough votes, they win. Google "Lisa Murkowski".

The other problem is that unlike parliamentary systems, in the US we vote for multiple things and not which party/who your MP is. These are some of the things on the ballot:

1. President & VP 2. Senator 3. Congress Representative 4. Judges 5. Ballot measures

Unless each of these is on a different sheet of paper, counting them might be hard. Don't get me wrong though. I think that we should be using paper ballots. What does it matter if it takes 2 days instead of 1 to figure out who won.

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> In the US, I think most places let you write in whoever you want. If they get enough votes, they win. Google "Lisa Murkowski".

Yes, I would imagine write-ins could complicate the situation considerably (thanks for the link, btw!) - though, if the proportion of write-ins is small, it probably won't matter much.

> The other problem is that unlike parliamentary systems, in the US we vote for multiple things and not which party/who your MP is.

This also happens in Portugal; we do use different pieces of paper (and different ballot boxes) for each of the positions we are voting for.

> I think that we should be using paper ballots. What does it matter if it takes 2 days instead of 1 to figure out who won.

Yes, I totally agree with you. There are more important things than a speedy count, and resilience to fraud is certainly one of them. And as far as costs go, they are probably dwarfed by the amount spent on the campaign. I really don't understand why anyone would be so eager to speed up the process, except for shady motives.

In Sweden people can also write whichever party they like and there are no problems counting those votes by hand. We get the preliminary result after 3 or 4 hours, and then they are all recounted the next day.

And, yes, we use one sheet of paper per election. On election day there are three separate elections (municipal, provincial, parliament) and optionally one or more referendums.

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