[EM] Why We Shouldn't Count Votes with Machines

[James Gilmour]

Dave Ketchum> Sent: Thursday, August 28, 2008 4:54 AM
> 
> Regrettably James is making an incorrect analysis of the problem.
> 

Oh dear!   I never thought for one moment that posting a link to a relevant news item for information would be taken as necessarily
signifying my agreement with its content.  If you look at my message, you will see there is no comment at all from me.  But just to
make sure, beyond all peradventure of a doubt, "Inclusion of a news item should not be taken to imply endorsement by this sender".

This debate is fascinating, especially as there are such divergent and polarised views.  It has surfaced in various other web groups
concerned with e-participation and e-democracy.  On the one hand there are some, and some countries, completely opposed to any
electronic processing of ballot papers in public elections, never mind the use of electronic voting machines of any kind.  At the
other extreme, we have countries like Estonia where e-voting for public elections has been fully embraced, apparently with few
reservations: registered electors can vote from their own laptops wherever they might be.

Here in Scotland there is a somewhat "hidden" debate that must be had.  STV-PR was introduced for local government elections in
2007.  The counting rules adopted (Weighted Inclusive Gregory Method for consequential transfers) make electronic counting almost
obligatory.  (Manual counting to WIGM rules is possible, but long and tedious because so many ballot papers have to be sorted and
counted again and again.)  So we used scanners, OCR conversion and e-counting.  The Scottish Government is promoting further use of
STV-PR for various directly elected bodies.  This is raising issues about the long-term provision of the equipment necessary for
e-processing of the ballot papers for all these different public elections and about the software that will be used for scanning,
OCR and counting.  Concerns about "black box" processing have been somewhat muted so far, but there have been calls for all blank
ballot papers to be subject to individual adjudication by the Returning Officer under scrutiny of the candidates and their agents.
This is an example of the ridiculous double-standards that are being applied to e-processing, because straightforward blank ballot
papers would never be subject to Returning Officer adjudication in a manual count.

James

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