Why automate the vote?

In 1987 Nobel Prize winning economist Robert Solow published a paper claiming that the massive increase in computers and technology around the globe had not, in fact, created any significant increase in productivity.  This became known as the Solow Paradox.  Of course computers were much simpler in the 1980s and today are much more complex.  Very few would argue today that society still suffers from the Solow Paradox… except in one important field.  The US Presidential Election. 

Here in the UK even the most contentious and close general elections are concluded within 24-48 hours.   This is without the use of any computers.  All votes are manually counted.  Even in a highly marginal constituency like Croydon Central where MPs have often had majorities of less than 100 the results are known on the morning after the polls close at 10pm.  This includes several occasions on which manual recounts have been required.

So one has to ask why, for example, Georgia in the US is still counting votes two weeks after the polls closed in the 2020 Presidential Election?  

Now, the population of Georgia is 10.62 million.  A UK parliamentary constituency is approximately 70,000.  So the constituency size is 151 times larger.  

 There are certain advantages of the UK system.   The number of votes and the number of candidates in even the marginal constituencies means that if the vote is close the loser can often be dissuaded from a manual recount by the physical evidence in front of them.  It is possible to point them at the pile of counted papers in the town hall and show them clearly that one is obviously smaller…

With 10.62 million votes it becomes more difficult to find one central venue to count them all in.
Washington State, USA did an estimate in 2004 that counting each vote took them 86 seconds.
Therefore counting a constituency in a UK general election would take 6,020,000 seconds which is 1672 man (or woman) hours.  The cost per constituency at 11 £per hour per worker would therefore be  a measely £18,396.

Using the same arithmetic a US Presidential election in Georgia would take 253,700 man (or woman) hours to count.  And the cost would be £2,790,700.

How long it should take is an unmeasurable quantity because it depends how many people are employed to do the count but somewhere of in the region of 100 people are quite capable of counting the vote in a UK constituency in a day.

Actually official figures put the cost of the 2017 General Election at £140m of which £98m covered fees and expenses incurred by Returning Officers in running the poll.  There are over 30,000,000 votes.  So in fact the cost of counting each vote is £3.27.  

So the actual cost of a UK constituency vote is £228,900.  

Yes, this is a factor of 12 more than cost of counting votes at around minimum wage but there are oversight and organisation activities and the cost of running the ballot its self included.

The Dominion voting machines used in the US do little more than optically scan the ballots passed through them.  Therefore they are only a very little more efficient than the human eye.  So what’s the point?  We’ve been here before with the Florida Hanging chads of 2000

Really why are people trying to automate elections?  Why are governments paying companies to reduce overheads on a process that is hardly expensive anyway…?  Is £3.27 a voter every four years really too much to spend to do the job manually when the risks of a disputed election result and the corresponding costs of litigation and potential civil unrest are much higher?  I'm not a luddite/  I'm all for automating everything possible.  I'm for the cashless society.  I'm for HS2.  I'm for more speed cameras... Well, some more.  But automation is useless if it speeds up a process while introducing error or uncertainty.  Particularly when system failure = disaster.

Most of the genuine mistakes in vote counts come not from optical hardware, software or the human eye but from Returning Officers miscounting the tallies.  This is why it is vital that as many votes as possible are counted in a minimum number of central locations.  As we can see from the US Presidential elections automated counting by whatever means only leads down one road … the cul-de-sac of counting failures and the dead end of making it easier for the unscrupulous to maintain in the face of the truth that the vote was stolen.
 

Why? Why? Why?  Does the US government make these same mistakes over and over again...  ?

Of course this election was a bit different.  There were lots of mail-in ballots which need to go through fraud checks before they can be counted but there is no way any state should still be counting its votes 2->3 weeks after an election.  In the UK votes are counted by hand and the results are known in 48 hours.  The longest a general election has ever taken in the UK is 21 days (3 weeks) in 1945 when votes had to be shipped home from overseas in boats.  

Why is it taking anyone in the USA this long to sort out an election?  Is there a World War on? 
 

Why does one of the most prosperous nations in the world insist on counting its ballots by automated methods that result in mistakes? Or worse allow the unscrupulous to suggest that mistakes were made because people don’t understand the system?  

The beauty of pen and paper is its simple, it’s transparent and people trust it.  And that’s what’s most important.  Trust.  You could have the best automated vote counting system in the world but if people don’t trust it …it’s failed.  

This is why in the UK votes are counted the old fashioned way.  By hand.  Because it’s important that votes are counted by people.  In the same way it is important that Juries are made of real people.  What statement is it to the people that you would rather trust a Dominion voting machine than their real eyes?  And what for?  £3.27 a person every 4 years?  

It is just reassuring to see votes counted by hand.  And it is nice that, here in the UK, there is a civic pride on behalf of local authorities in counting the votes quickly as well as accurate and … by hand.  Despite what some civic leaders would like to pretend speed is important too - it lends confidence to the process.  And there are always those waiting in the wings to undermine confidence in the system.