At 9:24 AM -0700 8/18/08, Eric Rescorla wrote:
(and because of the complexity of US elections, hand counting is quite expensive)
This is quite disputable. Further, hand vs. machine counting is core to the way we think about the security of the voting system.
On a "complex" ballot, there are maybe 20 races or propositions, some of which may allow multiple votes per race. The pre-electronic method for hand-counting these was to start with race #1, have one person reading each vote out load from a large stack of ballots, and another person tabulating. In most districts, this is done twice with different people doing the counting and, often, those people coming from the "opposite party" in our wonderful two-party system.
The numbers I saw in the late 1970's said that each vote took 2.5 seconds per ballot per race when done slowly; so that's 5 seconds when run twice. Per "complex" ballot, that's about 100 seconds, or roughly 2 minutes, or roughly 1/30 of an hour. At current labor rates of $12/hour for this type of work (that's high, but we want qualified people to count), that means it costs about US$0.40 per ballot for a complex ballot.
Essentially no one would argue that is is "quite expensive". I suspect that nearly everyone in the country would be happy to pay an additional $1/election for more reliable results.
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