Talk:Vote counting

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This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 25 August 2020 and 10 December 2020. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Pqt5124. Peer reviewers: Cbk5351.

Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT (talk) 12:34, 17 January 2022 (UTC)

Update

There was a lot of information on this page that needs to be moved to voting machines. Some of it is just better left out entirely though. It does still need a bunch of work. I tried to get it to the point where the article is acutally talking about vote counting, rather than vote recording...

If anyone wants to jump in on this, the ACE articles in the external links have a lot of great information. -- Electiontechnology 08:02, 16 November 2006 (UTC)

Unfortunate organization of articles

The vote counting method (manual, optical scan, etc) is a direct consequence of the technology used to hold an election, or carry out a plebiscite. It does not really make sense to write a separate article about just the counting phase across all such technologies. That could of course change if you found some notable aspect that is independent of election implementation technology.

The page Voting system (disambiguation) briefly defines the scope of this article by differentiating it from other areas of interest that could be labeled "voting systems". That page separates the technology used for casting votes (Voting machines) from the technology used to count and tabulate them. However, the novel End-to-end auditable voting systems do not fit anywhere when the subject matter is split in that way.

Given the strong suspicions of election fraud that still surround the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections in the USA, the subject of how an election should be organized in order to achieve legitimacy for the results, must be considered of primary interest to the public, and it is likely that most people who land on the Vote counting system page are actually having this broader question in mind.

As I see it, there are two areas of broad notoriety: 1) How to measure the preferences of the people, and 2) how to translate the measured preferences into an actual decision (e.g. of who should sit in a congress). The latter question is the subject of the current Voting systems page.

The second question determines the exact questions that people are asked to answer in an election, e.g. "which candiadate is your first, second, third preference". Still the question of how to collect answers and total them is largely independent of the questions being asked. I think the disambiguation page should reflect this primary division of the subject, and if necessary, this page should be renamed to reflect its real scope. The technical details of the various voting machines should be seen as subordinate to the broader question of how to count votes. Cacadril (talk) 01:10, 24 February 2010 (UTC)

Edit Buttons Are Working Wierdly

Just a small notice, the edit buttons (as in my browser,which is Firefox 44.0.2) are not showing up as normal, as in usual wikipedia articles, so I believe they should be looked upon. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Ragwiks (talk • contribs) 13:42, 7 March 2016 (UTC)

Requested move 1 June 2016

The following is a closed discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. Editors desiring to contest the closing decision should consider a move review. No further edits should be made to this section.

The result of the move request was: page moved.(non-admin closure) Eventhorizon51 ^(talk) 13:18, 9 June 2016 (UTC)

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Vote counting system → Vote counting – Generally, vote counting is a task and a corresponding procedure, but not a "system". While some legislations may make use of electronic vote counting technology that may be considered a "system", the majority of legislations still rely on manual counting. As this constitutes an overview article, we need to be sufficiently generic. There already are more specific articles on all kinds of counting technology. --PanchoS (talk) 17:26, 19 May 2016 (UTC) – Fixed {{Requested move}} badge: PanchoS (talk) 18:03, 1 June 2016 (UTC)

• Support – The present title is particularly ambiguous because it can be confused with a voting system which describes particular electoral rules. The proposed move would alleviate this concern. — JFG ^talk 12:41, 3 June 2016 (UTC)

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The above discussion is preserved as an archive of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on this talk page or in a move review. No further edits should be made to this section.

External links modified

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Redirect from Hand counting

Hand counting redirects to this article. On 2020-02-18, @Dmehus changed target from the beginning of the Manual counting section to the subsection on Errors in manual counts. I'm not sure the reason to redirect just to Errors in manual counting, rather than to the whole Manual counting section. The whole term manual counting does mean hand counting here, as stated in the first sentence of Manual counting.

@Dmehus also added a hatnote about the use of "hand counting" to mean counting on one's fingers. I'm not familiar with that usage, but it may certainly happen. Redirected people won't see the hatnote unless we redirect to the top of the article. Numbersinstitute (talk) 07:11, 19 February 2020 (UTC)

Numbersinstitute, I changed it to "Errors in manual counting" as that's where it's mentioned. I'll re-adjust the section to "Manual counting." The hatnote, though, is necessary because it's ambiguous and could refer to counting with one's hands, at finger-counting. Doug Mehus T·C 07:14, 19 February 2020 (UTC)

Numbersinstitute  Done. It's back to Vote counting#Manual counting. Doug Mehus T·C 07:16, 19 February 2020 (UTC)

Simplistic

This is terribly written and far to simplistic to describe the testing of voting machines. 2601:280:4781:4CF0:BD63:D192:13FE:CF32 (talk) 14:38, 3 September 2022 (UTC)