White Papers

Counting Ballots

• Tags:
• reporting,
• hand,
• vote,
• count

Overview This paper is one of a series on the evolution of voting technologies.

It sounds so simple: To count ballots, just count the number of votes cast for each candidate. Whoever gets the most wins! In fact, ballot counting in a real election is far more complex than this, primarily because the job is divided up between multiple agents who are not all trustworthy, but also because the actual counting rules are complicated by such options as races where multiple winners may be declared or where voters are allowed to cast multiple votes or weighted votes.

This presentation focuses on the former issue, that of arriving at a trustworthy count in the presence of counters who are not necessarily worthy of trust in the context of an electoral system that is divided into many precincts and local election jurisdictions. At the end, we will examine modified counting rules for more complex elections with multiple winners or weighted votes.

This discussion does not depend, much, on whether the counting is being done by people using paper ballots, or by machine. The issue of un-trustworthy counters arises with either humans or software, and the issue of errors in vote reporting is no less significant with electronic vote reporting than it is with hand transcription of hand delivered written reports.

The rules given here governing the conduct of an election are not intended to represent the rules used in any particular jurisdiction, but rather, these rules are but one example of a reasonable approach to vote counting.

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