Comment Re:Why not pencil and paper? (Score 1) 485
The reason why just writing an X won't work for most US elections is we generally have a great many more decisions to make on each ballot.
In the UK, in your national elections you only have one choice to make: your local MP. Whichever party gets the most MP's gets the prime ministership. Counting a single office can easily be done by hand, and since you're only counting one constituency, there aren't that many ballots to deal with.
In the election in San Francisco coming up on Tuesday, we have 3 offices (mayor, district attorney, sheriff) and 13 referendums to choose from. (Sample ballot at http://web.sfgov.org/site/uploadedfiles/election/D ocs/Sample_Ballots.pdf)
There are around 800,000 people in San Francisco; in our last election 270,000 votes were cast. So that's 16 * 270,000 = 4.3 million individual votes to count. It's simply not practical to do that by hand.
And that's just one city. Next spring, we have the statewide presidential primary, in which Californians will be picking candidates for president, Senate, House of Representatives, state legislator, and probably around 30 state and local referendums.
Elections in the US are just more complicated than you have in the UK; getting the votes counted quickly and accurately is going to need technology.
In the UK, in your national elections you only have one choice to make: your local MP. Whichever party gets the most MP's gets the prime ministership. Counting a single office can easily be done by hand, and since you're only counting one constituency, there aren't that many ballots to deal with.
In the election in San Francisco coming up on Tuesday, we have 3 offices (mayor, district attorney, sheriff) and 13 referendums to choose from. (Sample ballot at http://web.sfgov.org/site/uploadedfiles/election/
There are around 800,000 people in San Francisco; in our last election 270,000 votes were cast. So that's 16 * 270,000 = 4.3 million individual votes to count. It's simply not practical to do that by hand.
And that's just one city. Next spring, we have the statewide presidential primary, in which Californians will be picking candidates for president, Senate, House of Representatives, state legislator, and probably around 30 state and local referendums.
Elections in the US are just more complicated than you have in the UK; getting the votes counted quickly and accurately is going to need technology.
