According to Wired News, the hand-couinting system sometimes gets it wrong, too.

Election officials in the Australian Capital Territory, one of eight states and territories in the country, turned to electronic voting for the same reason the United States did — a close election in 1998 exposed errors in the state’s hand-counting system. Two candidates were separated by only three or four votes, said Phillip Green, electoral commissioner for the territory. After recounting, officials discovered that out of 80,000 ballots, they had made about 100 mistakes. They decided to investigate other voting methods.

According to this Slate article,

Australia also has a much higher rate of spoiled ballots than nearly any other democracy. There were 500,000 such ballots (out of 10 million cast) in this month’s election. These include protest votes and those cast by recent immigrants who were confused by the notoriously complicated ballots. It does not include “donkey votes,” so named because apathetic voters play pin the tail on the donkey at the polling station, randomly making their selections.

This, it seems, is partly a result of the “mandatory vote” laws, too. But I don’t think it represents an overall improvement, numerically, in the confusion of an American vote. Can you imagine the result of a like proportion of “spoiled ballots” in the 2000 election here?

Why do you allow the counting to be done in secrecy, with no prospect of audit, by a private corporation that previously states which party they want to win (Diebold, Ohio, 2004)?

I’m curious whether you think this is a matter of Walden O’Dell, chief executive of Diebold Inc., making a singularly inappropriate boast, in his role as a citizen involved in politics, or a case of an entire corporation, or important parts of it involving more than one employee, conspiring to throw the election by changing people’s votes.

Personally, I like the “marked by hand” model. This is what Canada does, and they seem to have no problems either.

Just because we’re the U.S., we think we need to be in front of the curve of technology. But oftentimes technology fails us and we’re left wanting more.

Let’s hope we recognize this soon and adopt a more common sense system.

I live in Australia. Please do not leap to the conclusion that I am a cheer-leader for our system: it has flaws. What I like about it is that elections are run by a government body, the Australian Electoral Commission. All the voting slips are identical (apart from names of candidates of course!) in every polling booth nation-wide. The slips are marked by hand and votes are counted by hand. Candidates can, and do, delegate people to observe the count at every polling booth. I do not remember a single incident of the AEC being suspected of fudging the count or of assisting any candidate.

Old tech? Yep.
Slow? We usually get a result within 2 – 3 hours.
Expensive? Don’t know, don’t care.
Trusted? Yep.

In part because blogs like this one ridicule anyone who makes a stink about it.

I think you’ll find that the blogosphere is a big proponent of better voting methods and more transparency.

I voted for Gore in 2000 and was PISSED when he lost. I voted for Kerry in 2004 and wasn’t surprised when he lost.

Jimmy Carter could have talked about all sorts of things, but he chose to say he had “no doubt” that Gore won in 2000. And if you’re not laying at least some blame at his feet, then I fear your partisan leanings are blinding you to destructive nature of Carter’s words.

Basically, if you’re going to be THE point man Dems on this issue, what exactly is the point of saying something like that? To rile up the base? Well, considered them riled, along with the faithful on the other side.

Carter is not insane (and debsay, if you don’t have something valuable to add, don’t comment), but he exercised some bad judgement here.

And to Alan’s point.

Why do you allow the mechanics of voting to be administered by openly partisan Party apparatchiks (Florida 2000)? Why do you allow the counting to be done in secrecy, with no prospect of audit, by a private corporation that previously states which party they want to win (Diebold, Ohio, 2004)?

This is an aspect of the USA that genuinely puzzles me.

Trust me, it puzzles me too and I hope it changes before the next election rolls around, but if Carter is going to come out swinging like this, it hurts those chances.

In part because blogs like this one ridicule anyone who makes a stink about it.

Why do you allow the mechanics of voting to be administered by openly partisan Party apparatchiks (Florida 2000)? Why do you allow the counting to be done in secrecy, with no prospect of audit, by a private corporation that previously states which party they want to win (Diebold, Ohio, 2004)?

This is an aspect of the USA that genuinely puzzles me.

The insane never question themselves…

Most elections are not close enough for highly accurate voting procedures to matter much. Even the tight PA 2000 presidential race that Callimachus talks about had Gore beating Bush by 204,000 votes (http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0876793.html). Let’s just admit that, if you want to claim that fraud or incompetence swayed the outcome, that’s a huge margin that you’ve got to explain.

But even the best run elections are not going to be able to unquestionably establish a winner when the margin is a few hundred votes. There will always be imperfect balloting systems, procedures that were not correctly followed, ineligible voters who were allowed to vote, ambiguous votes that must be decided according to some rule, and on and on. Florida 2000 (and the Washington governor’s race 2004) were simply too close to unarguably decide given our present voting systems.

One might take the consolation that either candidate, in such a situation, is probably acceptable because half (to a good approximation) of the voters preferred him or her.

Some more recent examples of the shenanigans here.