Re: Henry Norr's "Inside The Black Box"

Lessons From The North
Re: Henry Norr's "Inside The Black Box"

We Canadians are watching your election problems and laughing our butts off.

Forget touch screens and electronic voting. In Canadian Federal elections, two barely paid representatives of each party, known as "scrutineers," are present all day at the voting place. If there are more political parties, there are more scrutineers. To vote, you write an "X" with a pencil in a one-centimeter circle beside the candidate's name, fold the ballot up and stuff it into a box. Later, the scrutineers and any voter who wants to watch all sit at a table for about half an hour and count every ballot, keeping a tally for each candidate. If the counts agree at the end of the process, the results are phoned in and everyone goes home. If they don't, you do it again. Fairness is achieved by balanced self-interest, not by technology. The population of Canada is about the same as California, so the elections are of comparable scale. In the last Canadian Federal election the entire vote was counted in four hours. Why does it take 30 days or more for some states in the United States?

The 2002-2003 budget for Elections Canada was just over $57 million U.S. dollars, or $1.81 per Canadian citizen. It is extremely hard to get an equivalent per-citizen figure for U.S. elections, but trust me, it is a lot higher. Recently, San Francisco held a run-off mayoral election that cost $2.5 million, or $3.27 per citizen of the city. And this was for just one election, not a whole year of them.

You are spending $3.9 billion or $10 per citizen for new voting machines. Canada just prints a few hundred thousand dollars worth of ballots.

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