[EM] Ballot design (new simple legal strategy to get IRV)

[robert bristow-johnson]

On 10/10/15 5:57 PM, Juho Laatu wrote:
>> On 11 Oct 2015, at 00:43, robert bristow-johnson<rbj at audioimagination.com>  wrote:
>>
>> On 10/10/15 5:30 PM, Juho Laatu wrote:
>>>> On 11 Oct 2015, at 00:10, robert bristow-johnson<rbj at audioimagination.com>   wrote:
>>>>
>>>> On 10/9/15 4:00 AM, Juho Laatu wrote:
>>>>> I just note that there can be also simple ballots like in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_list (see the picture). If one wants to expand that to ranked ballots with high number of candidates, one could simply allow the voter to write multiple numbers in the ballot instead of only one. One could thus cast a ranked vote by writing few numbers, e.g. "23 74 74 5 234 321".
>>>>>
>>>> and a machine is gonna scan that?
>>> Manual scan by default. In Finland the open list ballots (bullet votes) are counted today by hand right after the polling station closes (within say 1 hour). I'd propose to do the same also with the (extended) ranked ballots. With ranked ballots you need to introduce also computers to store the ranked data, and the process takes a bit longer.
>>>
>>> Machine scanning could be used too if it is reliable enough. Maybe so that machines use human help for ballots whose interpretation is not obvious.
>>>
>> listen, here in Vermont, i have worked on a few different election recounts where we had to examine thousands of ballots by hand.  many people mark even bubble or bullet ballots so poorly that even that fails machine scanning.  i know there is Optical Character Recognition (OCR), but i would not trust that to recognize numbers written by voters on ballots.  numbers like "3" and "8" get confused.  and other pairs, like "1" and "7" and "5" and "8".  or "5" and "6".
> I'd trust humans to be the final judges.

in a recount, yes.  but ballots should not be designed to preclude 
machine tabulation in normal use.  and i don't think that OCR technology 
is good enough presently to rely on for governmental elections where the 
voting population is large.  when elections come out so close that we 
wonder who the real winner is, then yes, there should be careful manual 
recounts mandated by law with procedures established in advance and put 
into law.

-- 

r b-j                  rbj at audioimagination.com

"Imagination is more important than knowledge."