alt Hacker NewsI run the count at one of the constituencies. We have about 42.000 people on the electoral register and we'll probably see about 75-80% turnout, so we're going to be counting about 33.000 votes with about 30-35 people on staff, 24 of them doing the actual counting.
For the interest of the HN crowd, here is the technical report:
You'll find that the Icelandic voting system is very low tech.
The electoral registry for each local precinct is printed out and each voter is marked as having voted by hand. Three copies are made and three independent staffers make their own marks in their copy. These registers then come with the ballots to the count site to possibly exclude absentee ballots.
We use a paper ballot, marked using a pencil. Votes are counted by hand using a system of double counting and verification. Numbers are checked and cross checked throughout the process.
The count is added and checked in an Excel sheet and then reported by telephone or sometimes live broadcast to the media. Official reporting is usually via custom reports in Excel to the national electoral commission.
Replies
"marked using a pencil"
Why would you not want to mark paper ballots with pens / ink which will be harder to change?
We should never allow digital voting ever. Machines should only be allowed to help count with the ability to hand count the paper. There are so many exploits and leverage for software/hardware in any system (even closed ones) that has to be updated every year. It becomes very very hard to create a million "passable" paper votes out of thin air. It is trivial to do with a digital system.
Last time I voted in person in Germany it worked like that. I think a lot of the (supposed?) issues with voting in the US come from trying to automate it.
Not much different from the UK to be honest. The constituency and first past the post system means counting is a nicely decoupled distributed system.
Each constituency declares the local winner and the only outside impact is the total count of MPs for each party.
I would prefer something more complex that does give some of the smaller parties some MPs but no one seems particularly keen to change things.
We count votes in Czechia in very similar way and IMHO this beats any digital system by a mile. You don't have be an IT person to verify the count and trust the process, and the results for the entire country of 11 million are usually known in 3-4 hours.
Low tech enables multiple interested parties to physically oversee the electoral process. That is a good thing.