elections

I've wondered about this with regard to China. If a point comes when an attempt is made to "democratise" the country the logistics would be staggering. In principle you can partly offset this by devolving as much of the machinery of government as possible to regional authorities. So it strikes me more as a defect in the concept of nation-states than in the concept of democracy.

Count people? Hard, maybe impossible no matter what the country is. Counting votes is in theory possible no matter how large the enrolled population is because if a vote is there, it is there.

The larger countries do usually have defects in their electoral processes, either mechanically (the US) or due to un-free political systems. Democracy in theory could have any population you like.

im not so sure ed, the logistics seem less and less possible (how does india handle it?)

India's split into a number of states, each one probably maintains its bit of the national roll itself. They've got a central electoral commission though - here. You need millions of people to do work when there's polling, but most of them would, I imagine, be temporary, trained employees.

Once votes are counted in a State, they are just numbers, and easy enough to add..

Aristotle believed that the effective upper limit for a participatory democracy was roughly 30,000 citizens. There's a lot to recommend this point of view, IMO.

I don't even know how many people live in my house.

Anthony, could you explain what you mean by "count them" a bit more? Do you mean the logistical problem of tracking people, or actually ensuring that those who vote do so legally without fraud?

both in fact.

an election is a limited thing--can we ensure counting a billion people (in case of india) in a matter of days, with effectivness and without fraud?

Okay. In any relatively sophisticated electoral system, the roll is accessible and editable centrally, but also divsionally - the work is thus farmed out. I would imagine India has several thousand little subareas each manipulating the roll for electors in that area. So no problem there.

Counting is the hard bit. No government division has enough permanent, available employees to count in a matter of days. A good system - and I would imagine India does this - would allow scrutiny by representatives of candidates, but the actual labour would be done by temporary employees who have to be trained specifically and declare that they are not politically active. The consistency ensures there are standards that are followed by all counters. Depending on the system, it is not always necessary to count every vote straight away.

Most robust democracies are thought to be nearly free of electoral fraud. I believe your Canada is one of them. India is pretty clean in that regard too, at least comparatively.

Oh, how do rolls get updated? The sensible thing to do is to have information from births, deaths and other statistics fed to the commission for processing, otherwise usually it's self-reported, isn't it. In countries where fraud is widespread, single results are usually not that close, and if they are close enough for a small number of incidences of voter fraud to effect the outcome, a legal challenge would be issued where such a power actually exists - which it would in all but the most corrupt polities anyway.

The example of India is instructive - it is a relatively undeveloped country with a huge population, and I never hear about serious allegations of electoral fraud there (maybe because I do not pay attention).

I wonder, is part of the answer the difference between constituency systems and presidential systems? I can't but think that in a country like Mexico with a national vote it would be easier to shave in some extras.

More generally, can elections be seen to be run fairly? Yes. There is a massive international industry in going out and checking that elections are fairly run, and the people that do this kind of stuff have the expertise to spot when things are going seriously awry. I am hoping to become one of these people later this year... what election should I monitor?

On the other hand - part of the reason for the Florida farce was the way the electoral process is so localised in the USA.

"the electoral process", haha. More like thousands of discrete processes with no consistency or standardisation across the lot, run by partisans.

India's system is a good one - descended from the UK model, which is pretty robust. There are lots of other robust ones that produce odd results (mixed member proportional, like in NZ). I like the Hare-Clark system, myself - the ballot paper was fun to fill out.

i'm happy to say that canada's system is fantastic, as someone who has both been a non-partisan poll clerk and partisan scrutineer. one of my only fears about inevitable electoral reform is that someone will seize the opportunity to sell the gov't on a load of voting machines and technology that irreparably compromise the process.

today, it's foolproof. i can't recall an incident of serious electoral fraund in canada. all done with paper and pencil.

Ireland's fairly unique electoral system (bequeathed to us by the Brits) has the side effect of limiting fraud, because the parties compete internally as well as externally, meaning that there are more people to cry foul if you are rigging the results.

Yes, Ireland uses Hare-Clark voting (though they don't call it that), which is good. It means that, amongst many representatives, you can easily cast your vote for a party but against a candidate you don't like by putting him/her behind everyone else.