We are in 2014, so why are we still relying on people counting small white pieces of paper?? Surely, an electronic system would be cheaper, faster, and more reliable? (even if it did use pieces of paper as a “validator”)

No-one trusts the tech, I expect.

I think I’m going to start closing ‘scotland’ threads on spec, we’ve got about 27 running now.

I would imagine it would take a British government about 10 years and £25 billion to fail to deliver an electronic voting system.

at some point you will be in bed and we will still be up 😈

If it yes you get another 18 months of this …not even I want that

I think legally they have to include the Western Isles in the referendum.

Slippery slope. Before you know it we’d be voting every Saturday night on our smartphones for whatever motions had been tabled in parliament that week. You don’t want to give the people something approaching real democracy do you?

at some point you will be in bed and we will still be up

True, but then I’ll wake up and be grumpy. To paraphrase Dr David Bruce Banner, you wouldn’t like me when I’m decaffeinated.

I think I’m going to start closing ‘scotland’ threads on spec, we’ve got about 27 running now.

That’s Undemocratic……….we have a right to a voice that cannot be silenced by your tyrannical regime…………

…………………..runs back under rock and hides

STW isn’t a democracy. It’s a benevolent dictatorship.

Why not electronic? I’d start with something that is going to be a landslide not something that is going to be close and subject to lots of angry scrutiny.

What kind of electronic system would you propose that wouldn’t become embarrassingly outmoded between one election and the next. If we already had electronic polling in the uk the current referendum would have been conducted in windows 8, if we’s started at the last general election we would be using windows 7 instead, of if it had been one before that then XP, the one before that we’d be doing this one in windows 98.

If you’d started with windows 98, and wanted to get a full 10 days worth of general election use out of your system you’d have to hope that windows ’45, when its released, has really good legacy support.

The system we have now is incredibly cheap, completely transparent, very hard to influence, very easy to verify in the event of controversy and fairly quick to return. A digital system that did all of those things would be very tough to design.

Electronic voting has been tried on a number of occasions in various places (e.g. USA, Eire) and flaws are often found. The flaws range from simply mis-counting, to allowing corrupt officials to untraceably change the results.

An electronic voting system is essentially a black box that cannot be trivially audited, unlike a paper system where it is very easy to see if it is being done properly.

http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/21.14.html
http://www.popsci.com/gadgets/article/2012-11/how-i-hacked-electronic-voting-machine

etc
etc

No change to the existing system except one:

after placing your ballot paper in the box, you press the appropriate button. This gives and instant tally. Later, the paper copies can be counted under much less time pressure to confirm and make official the result.

after placing your ballot paper in the box, you press the appropriate button. This gives and instant tally. Later, the paper copies can be counted under much less time pressure to confirm and make official the result.

That does rely on you entering the same thing twice, potentially swap it round and press the button (after scanning your national ID card) then it prints your voting paper which you then deposit having checked it.

What kind of electronic system would you propose that wouldn’t become embarrassingly outmoded between one election and the next. If we already had electronic polling in the uk the current referendum would have been conducted in windows 8, if we’s started at the last general election we would be using windows 7 instead, of if it had been one before that then XP, the one before that we’d be doing this one in windows 98.

If you’d started with windows 98, and wanted to get a full 10 days worth of general election use out of your system you’d have to hope that windows ’45, when its released, has really good legacy support.
Have you ever heard of Unix?

Maybe it’s because sometimes the old ways are the best.

Ireland tried it out recently. By the time the next vote came around: the tech was out of date and the commisioning politician involved (allegedly) had retired to sunnier climes.

The cost per vote per head per election worked out at about £10 IIRC.

From Wiki:

As of October 2010, the total cost of the electronic voting project has reached €54.6 million, including €3 million spent on storing the machines over the previous five years.[10]

KMK Metals Recycling paid €70,267 for 7,500 e-voting machines; 1,232 transport/storage trolleys; 2,142 hand trolleys and 4,787 metal tilt tables.[11]

Would it stop this

Hanging chads.

And that above is a pile awaiting sorting. As sky have told everyone and anyone with any sense worked out already.

We do a lot of that electronic voting crap here in the US as a result of the Bush/Gore punchcard ballot debacle in Florida. 😆 So the gov’t mandated electronic voting machines. 🙄

They cost a lot of $$$. There have been some issues with them being hacked or not programmed correctly, but overall relatively minor. No doubt, the hardware will become obsolete and unsupportable and need replacement. And some old people have trouble using them ’cause its a computer.

Where I live, they used mechanical voting machines for maybe 50 or 60 years with no real issues, so the electronic ones really weren’t needed. I don’t see any way that the electronic ones will last that long. The new ones are smaller, so easier to store and move, so that is a plus. And results are available sooner, except for the absentee (mailed) ballots which often take another week or two.

Edit – this is what we used to use

Last couple of times I’ve voted here in Belgium in local elections its been electronic. Seems to work ok to me

Hanging chads.

not from electronic voting machines.

Before you know it we’d be voting every Saturday night on our smartphones for whatever motions had been tabled in parliament that week.

Electronic voting seems to work for the staturday night Strictly Ice Dancing Bake-off shows.

Add on some kind of unique voter-ID code arrangement to ensure only a single vote per person.

And presto, you too could be voting for who you want to see on the Sunday evening Parliamentary Dance-Off.

Would it stop this

What, Photoshopped images?

They would still have had to send the floppy disk across by boat from Orkney.

Whoever has supervisory access to the system has the power to change the result.

Yes or No can be hard to work it out.

https://www.facebook.com/video.php?v=454147981392768&fref=nf

Nsfw sweary content

Aren’t the counters volunteers currently?

Paying a private company millions to fix a system that isn’t broken would stink of cronyism, and I’m not even binners.

And you’d still need a manual voting system for those who don’t have access to t’internet, like the only people who seem bothered to vote – the elderly.