European Parliament Elections 2024 - Friday, June 7th

With all the fuss over TV Debates exclusions, based on this article they don't make a difference?

Cynthia Ní Mhurchú and Susan Doyle still polled well despite not appearing in the South debate!

Terry Prone: When all is said and done, TV debates won’t win you the votes
The general consensus is that television debates are about killer blows that shift the voting public

Similar story in the south: Cian Prendiville (Solidarity/People Before Profit) polled 6,243 first preferences and Susan Doyle (Social Democrats) polled 20,229. Neither featured in the Prime Time debate for their constituency.

More telling is the fact that Cynthia Ní Mhurchú (FF) who didn’t get to join in the debate polled 55,209 — she significantly out-polled Doyle, Bogue, and Prendiville together.

@AndrewJRenko Stop comparing home use device to possible industrial style devices. Newspapers are not printed on A4 machines for example.

A lot of that cost would be offset by what they pay the counters currently. I'm led to believe the cost is around between 400 to 500 per person day (hard to get the actual figure)

Come GE time that cost is in the millions alone (Can't be arsed doing a rough calculation tbh, but i can't be far off the mark)

He posted that picture as he keeps going on and on that it's impossible to scan a 75cm page, which is just a ludicrous observation. That was literally my first google on "Auto scrolling scanner".

It says it stacks 100pages, whether that's 75cm long or not, I don't know, as A: I don't really care, because this is a stupid argument and B: strangely enough, I don't own a scanner that costs nearly a grand. This business machine scans paper up to 6meters long, so I'm sure those in government procurement could easily find a scanner that could scan in all the ballots. The poster is just being difficult.

I've never seen anything more than a few seconds on TV of any individual count process, so coming to any conclusion about what did or didn't happen in a week long count process based on those few seconds would be quite foolish.

I posted that picture, because someone suggested that scanner would be able to accommodate a pile of 76cm long ballot papers in the input and output trays, but it wouldn't accommodate papers of that size in the tray.

You seem to be getting into a whole different process, with actual machines for casting votes onto paper using machine readable markings or punched holes. That would be a huge change to our process, and I'm not sure that it would be workable for PR STV, given that it's generally used for US elections, where they are doing FPTP choices between a small number of candidates.

From the last eVoting debacle, each of the 7,000 voting machines needed a dedicated operator to enable the machine for each voter, and disable the machine after each voter (which was the only way to register a spoilt vote). These 7,000 extra staff days exceeded or made a huge dent in the cost savings on counting.

@AndrewJRenko I post a link to a ballot scanning machine, not a voting machine.

Let the DS950 handle your absentee, early vote and Election Day ballot scanning and sorting, all without missing a beat. The purpose-built DS950’s advanced technology and engineering make the high-speed scanner and tabulator best-in-class — there’s nothing like it on the market! 

I then mentioned you may need to change the format and type of ballots to suit the machine. You where looking for examples of machine to do it. Like everyone else I'm not going to continue going around in circles discussing this topic with you.

Just what we need to base the stability of our democracy on - zero thought solutions.

Fire ahead so, Einstein, tell us your solution to that resource issue?

Yes, I know it's a ballot scanning machine. But it requires voting machines to produce the ballots to be scanned, not hand-written ballots like hours. It won't scan PR STV handwritten ballots as used in elections in Ireland.

Unfortunately, we haven't gotten as far as going round in circles. We've just got very short one-step-forward two-steps-back so far.

absentee, early vote and possibly postal votes needing a voting machine! YA!

Software can be changed to suit the the types of scanning. Ballots could become just a ticking option instead of writing numbers. 1 to 27 (or what ever the number) under each candidate listed.

Thank God this didn't end up happening.

As I said going around in circles with you. Someone suggested a electronic counting machine instead and people have pointed out the means and ways to make that possible.

I have already stated that I was against e-voting both in 2002 and now. You also said that we would need machines to mark the ballots. I suggest an alternative option.

No one has pointed out the ways and makes for scanning hundreds of thousands of large ballot papers in any reasonable time period.

More importantly, no one has pointed out any business case for going down this road.

Maybe back of fag packet ideas aren't great ideas?

Shocker!