"I think for places like Aus, NZ - with small populations and a handful of population centers, what you are saying makes a lot of sense. For a place like India, the problems pretty much require electronic voting. I am old enough to still remember paper ballots in India. Imagine having to could of the order of 600 million(!) votes."

This scale argument is totally spurious. Australia is one of the older continuous democracies so we have had a lot of population growth since federation, vote counting hasn't slowed down each time the population has doubled (indeed I'd suspect it's gotten faster as people have telephones and over 100 years of institutional experience at the federal level). Counting votes scales because as the population scales you have more money and more people to count votes. Let's say you have two paid electoral officials and 100 volunteers for each 10,000 voters. A country with 20,000 people would have four paid electoral officials and 200 volunteers, a country with 1 million people would have 200 paid officials and 10,000 volunteers.

Australia also has some of the most spread out and remote polling stations in the world due to our being much larger geographically than India so there goes that argument as well. Additionally it's far easier to get a cardboard ballot booth and paper ballots to various remote places than it is to get machines there. Not only do you have to lug machines around they need electricity and maintenance personnel. The Indian machines run on batteries, but how long until they need replacing if they are in storage for 5 years between each use? A more complex machine would need a lot more power than batteries could provide as well, and more complex machines would be needed. The Indian voting machines are having to add a printed validation, at great cost and adding complexity, so they are acknowledged as being flawed in their current state.

I am not making any arugments - I am not sure what has offended you so much. I am simply unaware of the AU/NZ electoral systems. The parent post was making a point that paper balloting seems to work well in Australia, and I took the poster at their word.

If you are insisting paper ballots worked well in India and machines don't, I can only imagine you don't know what you are talking about.

The scaling you speak of doesn't work - complexities scale superlinearly and so do costs. We know this in our daily lives, in our networking architectures, when we argue scaleup/scaleout, etc.

The economic scaling - money available per capita for spending on elections - also doesn't scale linearly like you seem to be implying. Even if, for the sake of argument, it did - I would prefer not to spend it like that if I can save money using EVMs. That money has better uses out here.

Even with one of the largest paramilitary forces in the world, India needs to stagger its elections across a couple of weeks as the security apparatus moves around. That also doesn't scale. Paramilitaries are not maintained as a proportion of the population, but as per the security needs of the country. Local police should scale as per population, but India is significantly underpoliced. Also the Election commission tends to not trust local police with election security as by definition the police reports to and is allied to the incumbents.

Elections don't happen once every five years - India has a central Election authority and the machines are constantly in use, shuttled all around the country as needed. I also don't understand what the trouble is with replacing batteries every few years? You have to remake cardboard booths and reprint ballots as well, don't you? No one said EVMs are cost free.

"_ so there goes that argument as well_"

Where are you "sending" these arguments? They don't seem to have gone anywhere at all. If you think polling 16 million people in a rich country is more complex than polling 815 million people in a poor one, please sit down and have a rethink. It is very very hard to fathom that difference in scale.

"If you think polling 16 million people in a rich country is more complex than polling 815 million people in a poor one, please sit down and have a rethink. It is very very hard to fathom that difference in scale."

I think you have misunderstood my argument. I totally agree that the Indian election is more complex. But I argue that complexity comes from places other than the counting itself, and returning to the subject at hand that means India's size and complexity in no way leads to the conclusion that its elections or anyone else's elections "pretty much require electronic voting". So in what follows I will examine the "ideal" case and then the rest of the issues.

In the ideal case, if we imagine a theoretical Westminster system with first past the post voting, we can pay 10 people to organise 250 volunteers per electorate of a theoretical 200,000 voters. They all start counting at the same time when polls close. In this system there are always 800 votes per volunteer to count. It doesn't matter how big the population gets there are always 800 votes to count for each volunteer. Population of 1 million? 800 votes per volunteer. Population of 8 billion? There is still only 800 votes per volunteer. So the system is scaling with the population. Thus India having 51 times (using your figures) as many voters as Australia does not mean it's 51 times more complex to count up the votes. Similarly, nobody would claim that the counting the votes in the UK election is somehow magically 3 times as complex as the Australian one or that elections in Australia now are many times more complex that elections in Australia 100 years ago.

Of course, leaving the ideal case somewhat, due to natural human variability a larger system will have more electorates that return their results slightly later. Indeed in an infinitely large imaginary system there might be an electorate where all 10 officials in one electorate die of a heart attack and it takes two days to get officials from other electorates to show up and do the count. In the real world with real humans, but still presuming they were operating on the exact same rules, the larger system (say the UK or the USA versus Australia) would likely have later returning results, but not by much. It's also worth remembering at this point that in many elections the last electorate to return a result is often irrelevant to "the ultimate result" as someone already will have a majority much earlier, many elections are conceeded by the loser well before the final tally comes in.

That there, in the ideal case or the "same system" with real people, is the basis of my objection to your comment that "for a place like India, the problems pretty much require electronic voting. I am old enough to still remember paper ballots in India. Imagine having to count of the order of 600 million(!) votes". I am not saying there aren't other sources of complexity: many languages, poverty, illiteracy of some voters, poor transport and corruption will all take their toll. But those problems are not solved by voting machines either. I continue to maintain that 600 million votes does not in any way shape or form "pretty much require electronic voting".

You are thinking of complexity _per_ agent. That is not where the complexity comes from.

If you have to evacuate an area using 4-seater cars - do you really not see the difference in complexity:

A - a village with 200 people, each household has their own car. You need 50 cars, maybe need to requisition/rent a few, the rest people bring by themselves. You don't need a police escort or barriade for orderly movement of 50 cars. People self organize, and you are good to go.

B - a town with 10000 people, 20% households have their own car. Now the administrator needs to arrange for 1000s of vehicles, make sure fuel is available for all of them. You will need to appoint "marshalls" for each block cause you won't be able to handle everything yourself. You also can't expect anyone to self organize at that scale.

Lets say you appointed 50 marshalls. You probably can't even manage all those by yourself. So you appoint 5 "chiefs" - 10 to a marshall.

You need additional staff to manage and track each vehicle. You also need enough police on hand to provide escort. You need to define "assembly points" so that people know where to show up.

Do you seriously not see the complexity that arises when you have 20,000 counters vs a million?

The difference between running a startup with 20 employees - you can do that in your house. No need for HR, building services etc.

Versus a 1000-employee company?

And vote counters at least in India are not volunteers - that would be a disaster. THey are govt employees on deputation. Similarly after polling you don't simply take the ballot boxes to the corner and count. There are a handful of counting arenas - heavy security, representatives of all candidates present etc. Senior "notaries" have to remain present, inspect every box for tempering and certify, with agreement from the candidate reps. WHen you are thinking of a million counters, do you seriously think there can be a say 10,000 notaries present to certify, and a million representatives of candidates keeping their eye on each vote counter? Thats not how the real world scales man.

Stop thinking in terms of 800 votes/counter - theres a MUCH MUCH larger structure there, you keep missing that.

The reason EVMs help is they are smaller and faster. A set of notary, election officer, candidate reps can process a machine in about 10 minutes when counting. An average machine may have 400-500 votes on it. So that means that one set of people can now count about 3000 votes an hour or 25000 votes per day. To count 600 million votes, you need 25,000 sets country wide.

With paper ballots, counting 500 votes would take half a day. So one set would count 1000 votes a day. Now you either need 625,000 sets of counters or more days.

Theres also the issue of securely printing, transporting, storing, issuing 600 million ballots, vs 1.2 million machines.

In anycase - the biggest flaw in your argument is you are arguing theory - 800/counter, so no complexity - and simply ignoring the real world 25 year long experience.

Things simply don't scale like you think they do. 100 page views/ web server doesn't mean you can simply install a million servers and serve out google.com. Saying this added complexity is "not from web serving" makes no sense.

Australia has a population of 25 million people.

India has a population of 1.25 billion.

And? This is like MapReduce, which scales well for certain problems, particularly those involving counting. If I am counting up the words in 25 TB of text in one case and counting up the words in 1250 TB of text in another, but in the first case I have 25 servers available to me and in the second case I have 1250 servers. How long does it take given in both problems each server is counting up the words in 1TB of text? Does it take 50 times longer to count up the words in the second problem? No, because there are 50 times as many servers. There are other issues which make the Indian elections complex, but counting the votes isn't one of them, and neither the counting nor the other issues mean that voting machines are "pretty much required" as was claimed.

The batteries in the Indian machines are replaced often. They're a kind you can buy cheaply in random shops, not like laptop batteries. (They look like the ones in smoke alarms.)