Worked a poll yesterday. We are paid and receive 3 hours if training - 9 for supervisors.
We had about 600 people vote at our location yesterday. 9 poll workers. Poll closed at 7:30 p.m; we had the ballots all counted and results phoned In by 8:30.
With no down-ballot voting, manual counting is easy.
In France its the same, Only paper votes, counted by hand. Here it is all done by volunteers, its not even particularly organized. When you go to vote you are asked if you want to volunteer that day to stay and count. Voting offices are relatively small, in Paris there are multiple per neighborhood so that it is very distributed.
Canada is very small. There's not that many to count. Very small country.
Different people count at each polling station, it doesn't matter if 150,000,000 people vote in the USA or 20,000,000 in Canada. The addition of the results from the polling stations is instantaneous. Or do you think they add them manually? 😀. Btw we counted much faster than in USA.
The US's problems with voting seem to be entirely self-inflicted-- and, in the case of one party in particular these days, by design. Even with their complicated ballots, they could deploy armies of paid poll workers, use paper ballots, and get through it all just as quickly and efficiently as other places. But to do all this, everyone has to agree that having every registered voter cast a ballot is actually a good thing. And that this is not the case in a country that routinely spends billions on political campaigns most years is astounding.
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Florida counts early ballots before election day and a lot of people vote early.
Other states like PA and MI don't count early ballots first and wait until all 'on the day' ballots are counted.
They tried to change this before the 2020 election because of COVID and a lot of people would be voting early but the Republicans blocked it because part of the plan was to have Trump leading and then the 'miraculous' comeback from the Democrats which could be used to 'prove' cheating. (Which, funnily enough you're still doing now.)
Wouldn't it just be easier for all states to work like Florida? I think all Democrat voters would agree with you.
Worked a poll yesterday. We are paid and receive 3 hours if training - 9 for supervisors.
We had about 600 people vote at our location yesterday. 9 poll workers. Poll closed at 7:30 p.m; we had the ballots all counted and results phoned In by 8:30.
With no down-ballot voting, manual counting is easy.
Good post!
As a volunteer with one of the parties, I want to add that each political party can send a "scrutineer" to watch the counting at a given polling station.
The Elections Canada worker (poster above) puts the ballot on the table and say "Liberal" / "Conservative" or whatever is marked on the ballot. (Or "spoiled" if they have left it blank, or written "I VOTE FOR ME" across the whole thing, or something else other than marking it properly.)
The scrutineers just watch, unless they see a problem, like an ambiguously marked ballot they think should go to their party (or not go to another party).
99.9% of the time the vote is very obvious and there is no debate. (It is fine to mark with a check, an X, filling in the whole circle, as long as one and only one option is marked.)
Maybe once in an election night at a polling station there will be a ballot that gets a few minutes of discussion. In theory, this could escalate to a supervisor, but I have never seen that happen in the several elections I've worked as a party scrutineer, with many thousands of ballots counted.
Canada is very small. There's not that many to count. Very small country.
Very silly post. This is like saying a university with 20,000 students and 2,000 staff should get out transcripts faster than a university with 40,000 students and 4,000 staff, simply because they are "smaller."
It doesn't work that way. In fact, due to efficiencies of scale the larger jurisdiction might be faster.
A larger country also has a larger population to draw from and hire as vote counters, obviously.
See Jessica Denson's YouTube. She actually interviews election security experts and goes in depth, unlike most media. Also search "Russian tail" in statistics to see a machine counting manipulation method.
In the US the machines are all hooked up to the internet and can be tampered with. However there is no need for am audit that checks the actual data that was counted. They are secure. So secure the financial institutions and the military which routinely get hacked could learn from our secure voting machines.
The thought of an audit is blasphemy. No state would ever ever consider an audit even though some counties have more votes than people.
It's interesting if they think counting them by hand somehow makes sure they're accurate? I think it would be more challenging to make sure zero human counters cheat the system and report false numbers than to make sure some software works properly and isn't tampered with.