Actually polling stations in France are split, maximum 1000 voters per station.
Technically it’s a bit weird because you can have more than one polling station in the same area, so it might be a bit confusing. But the procedure is such that you can’t put a ballot in the wrong box.
A big detail in France is that there is only one ballot at a time, in the US, my wife had 74 ballots simultaneously last time I checked. The US has an election every 2 years in November, and all the ballots are attached to this schedule. In France we have ballots at random date, when each term is finishing (and we elect far less people)
Not sure about France, but next door in Germany we try to put multiple elections on the same date, because organizing the polling stations is always the most expensive thing.
So it's not uncommon to have some of city mayor, city council, regional, state and federal and European elections fall onto the same date. I think the "worst" I've seen as a volunteer was 4 elections on the same day.
Counting process starts by splitting the ballots (if we have all of them in one urn), and then counting and tallying them one election at a time. The ballots are distinguished by different colored paper.
One voting district is usually around ~1000 voters, out of those, before Covid ~10-20% did mail-in-voting, during Covid it was ~40-50%. Then with a normal voter turnup of around 60-70% depending on the elections that are held, we end up with a few hundred ballots to count per election, with a staff of normally 8 people... Polling stations close at 6pm, and the latest I have left the voting station after counting was 8:30pm.
I'm surprised to see that they pay workers to count ballots. In France ballots are counted by benevolent citizens at voting places, and I always assumed it was a necessary condition for free democratic elections.
What about your country fellow HNer, how do elections work there ?
The key observation is that, since counting votes is an inherently distributed problem (with a comparatively simple centralized step at the end), you can always deal with it by adjusting the number of polling stations.
I can speak for what happens in Portugal. We use the d'Hondt system with paper ballots, and it is not uncommon to have around 15 candidates on a ballot in certain elections, though we have no write-ins - only one checkbox per candidate.
In the last elections there were about 4,000 polling stations. Since about 6,000,000 people are allowed to vote, this is around 1,500 people per polling station on average (obviously, the distribution is not uniform). Turnout seldom exceeds 50%, so in practice the number of votes is much smaller.
Votes are counted by hand - no automation at all - at each polling station. Usually, within about 5-6 hours 99% of the votes have been tallied, with the remainder done with by the morning after.
I would say it is demonstrably workable to count votes by hand, even with a large number of candidates. I concede that write-ins may present a difficulty, but honestly: since (afaik) in the USA you can only vote on designated candidates, how difficult can it be to have all of their names appear on the ballot?
In France, it works the same way as in Sweden evidently.
I believe one of the aspects that makes it different in the US is that on election day, there isn't only one thing to vote for. There's the President, a Senator, a Congressman, a Judge, local public transports directors, etc. and a bunch of propositions.
And that's different from one county to the next, from one state to the other.
I suppose that's part of what made it interesting to look into computerized voting machines.
As someone who’s done this before, it relies on tons of manual volunteer labor. You need around 0.75-1.25% of the population counting votes + the people running the polls.
The way French elections are run is insanely elegant though, it’s basically perfect from a security/transparency l POV.
A bit oversimplified, but in France, voters are essentially given a printed coupon book, with each candidate on a different coupon.
They just take their coupon/candidate of choice and deposit it into a box.
There are no pencils needed, no ambiguity. Ballots are hand-counted and totals are reached rapidly. A far less-hackable alternative to what exists in the US IMHO.
Same in norway. One ballot per party. In local elections we vote for both council and municipality, so there's two sets of ballots. Council ballot goes in one box and municipality ballot goes in another box. No reason why we couldn't have 20 boxes if we also voted for issues directly.
Also in local elections we can write in other people and give people on the ballot an "extra" vote for which we use a pen (but this is voluntary and I assume most don't bother).
We have it similar in the Czech Republic, except it's around ~700 eligible voters per polling place. Since the upcoming parliamentary elections are likely to have a ~60% participation, a team of several people at any random polling place is facing the insurmountable task of counting ~400 ballots in several hours.
I was going to ask if the French have anything as ridiculous as Australian senate ballot papers. I wouldn't expect volunteers to deal with those.
Then I remembered that the senate count at Australian polling booths is a rough approximation, and volunteers could do it easily. Do the French take their ballots to a central office for professionals to check?
There is nothing specific about the French system that cannot be replicated.
You need to be registered on the voter list, show up on election day with your passport or ID card, take a bunch of small papers with candidate names on them, go into a privacy booth to put whichever candidate you want in an envelope, then you walk to the center of the room where the election officers check your passport again, you have to sign your name on the list, and the head of the voting office opens access to a big transparent urn where you drop your envelop.
At the end of the day, the count of the votes is done in public.
I don't remember any history of voting fraud in any kind of election.
Maybe the (low) number of voting locations is a problem?
Around here, it's recommended to have a polling location for every 800~1000 voter and a booth per ~300 voters.
When the polling location closes, staff (volunteers) start counting very publicly: anyone can watch and the procedure is legally specified such that overseers can trivially keep track and count of everything, the results are certified, displayed at the polling location and (if necessary e.g. for non-local elections) sent up to the next administrative division.
Unless there are improprieties, it doesn't take very long to count a thousand votes.
I’m not American and I’ve never voted in a US election but I can tell you how it’s done in Germany (where electronic is all but impossible due to the standards the voting process is held to be the constitutional court)
- Election Day is always a Sunday; most folks don’t work on Sunday. Germany is pretty strict on that in general. Works well for this case.
- Each parliamentary district is subdivided into smaller voting districts.
- Each voting district is for ~2500 eligible voters. This keeps the lines short.
- Each voting district has one polling station (there are exceptions to this, a voting district with a prison or retirement home in it might have 2nd location)
- The voting district is run by volunteers. If there aren’t enough volunteers the municipality can draft citizens to do it and I’ve seen that happen. More often though the ranks are filled up with city employees, I’ve twice filled a leadership position in my voting district so I’m quite familiar with the rules.
- The diverse set of folks in the voting district keep the process in check but any citizen has the right to be in the room and observe the whole process. I’ve never seen anyone stay the whole day (at that point why not volunteer?) but I’ve seen folks show up for the counting.
- the process starts by showing the empty ballot container to all people present. During voting the container can’t be opened (multiple locks)
- as we do the count (manually & in a prescribed algorithm) the certain in-between results must be loudly announced to the room
- the final results must be loudly announced to the room. Since we’re usually in a class room in a school we also put it on the blackboard
- results are tallied up by election commissions on the city, county, state and federal level. City and county election commissions are usually run by the elected leader (unless they’re running for an election themselves), state and federal and run by the the office of statistics
- all the results, down the voting district level are available online
- I myself have checked numerous times that they count we arrived at in the voting district is correctly reflected on the city website
- it’s trivial from there to check if the count of all voting districts adds up to the final end result or not
- there are some watchdog organizations observing the overall processes. I trust that and error in adding the results gets caught by them but I could verify this myself since the data is public
This is a manual, somewhat expensive (in time, money wise it’s not too bad as volunteers aren’t paid and just get some refreshment money) way of voting. But I see no way of significantly manipulating this process without the involvement of thousands of people.
TL;DR if you take the time it’s trivial to check if you’re vote was counted correctly. You’re there to check if the ballot box is empty, you vote, you observe that no one is stuffing votes, you observe the count in the voting district and you check if your voting districts count was accurately reflected in the total
The UK has a similar system. You are required to go to a specific place to vote but these are normally very local and just for your neighbourhood, e.g. in the local school or church hall. My last three polling stations have been 0.1, 0.6 and 0.2 miles away.
There are 35k polling stations for 47m voters so each station has to process only ~1,300 voters in 15 hours. Queueing is unusual in my experience. Postal votes and voting by proxy are also options.
Election supervisors look for this. Also, the ballots themselves are not "write your vote on paper", they are specifically printed and available at the polling station.
The way the vote works is:
1. Come in at the polling station you are alloted to, based on your address.
2. Show your ID, and have them verify you are indeed on the electoral lists for this polling station.
3. Receive the ballot papers. These are stamped by the election official before they are given to you. You receive one ballot paper for each election currently organized (e.g. one paper for choosing your mayor, one paper for choosing your president etc). You also receive an official stamp. You are responsible for checking that the ballot you received is valid (stamped in exactly one place by the election official, not torn or scuffed etc). You can ask any election official for help if you suspect something is wrong.
4. Go into a polling booth, and put the stamp on the box for the candidate you want. Fold the ballot so your choice is not immediately visible (producing evidence of who you voted for, such as taking a picture or showing your ballot to someone else is a crime, punishable with a fine or jail time).
5. Put the ballot in the ballot box. There may be a single ballot box for all ballots, or one ballot box per election.
That's it - normally takes ~5 minutes, unless there are lines, which can happen at certain hours in certain busy places. Still, the size of polling stations is set by law to be big enough for the electoral lists of the area they are close to.
Counting is then simple:
1. Once the election day is officially closed, the ballot boxes are opened. Officials from each participating party are present in each polling station, and they perform the following operations together.
2. All ballots are validated and sorted. Any ballot which is not valid (e.g. not the right paper, not stamped by the election official, stamped in multiple places by the voter, stamped outside the vote area, paper is torn etc) is discarded. The discarded ballots are still numbered and stored, in case of disputes.
3. All ballots are opened and counted. Results are tabulated, and signed by all election officials in the polling station. The counted and sorted ballots are stored in secured bags. Results are communicated electronically to regional and then national election commissions.
3.5 Ballot counts must exactly match voter counts for this station. If they don't, police are called and videos are reviewed to identify the cause. Stolen or stuffed ballots are crimes and carry heavy fines or prison.
4. Election officials start collecting the bags from each polling station and storing them with each regional election commission office. The polling station attendants are responsible for ensuring the ballots arrive safely at the destination regional election office.
5. The process repeats until everything is centralized at the national electoral comission.
Preliminary results are typically announced starting ~1 h after the polls close.
Final results are typically announced the day after, usually by the night time.
Disputes at any level are arbitrated by the electoral commissions, and can be raised all the way up to the courts.
Any citizen can register beforehand and volunteer to work as an electoral official in any polling place, and personally monitor the process. Journalists and NGOs regularly do this.
Each political party keeps a separate, unofficial running count of the results.
The whole things scales beautifully, and is very hard if not impossible to systematically defraud (unless political parties systematically collude against their own candidates, but if they are willing to do that, the results don't really matter anymore anyway).
I don't understand how is it possible to design a paper ballot that is confusing. In France, you have 1 paper for each candidate with their name + party on the paper. You receive each paper by the post before an election AND there is always all the papers in the voting place anyway.
You just put the paper of the candidate you want to vote for in the ballot box and that is it.
I understand there is more complicated voting system (e.g where you can rate candidate), but when do you need to choose one option in several, why would anybody want to use a different voting paper design ?
Transparent voting boxes, ballots in envelopes, manual redundant counting done by people, usually voter who were nicely asked if they can come help back in the evening. That's what we use in France, you get the official result a few hours after the closing of the voting stations.
The whole process is watchable, from the sealing of the box the morning to the count in the end and parties send observers in random stations to check nothing fishy happens.
An official log book is open for anyone to notice if they feel something fishy happened (you were not allowed to vote, the counting was unfair, etc...)
Oh, and make voting day a holiday, or just put it on Sundays.
I used to wonder how US could not even get that last part right, but then I understood that a whole party thinks it is in its interest to have less voters.
Technically it’s a bit weird because you can have more than one polling station in the same area, so it might be a bit confusing. But the procedure is such that you can’t put a ballot in the wrong box.
A big detail in France is that there is only one ballot at a time, in the US, my wife had 74 ballots simultaneously last time I checked. The US has an election every 2 years in November, and all the ballots are attached to this schedule. In France we have ballots at random date, when each term is finishing (and we elect far less people)
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