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CronoDAS comments on Rationality Quotes September 2012 - Less Wrong
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Elections can take quite a bit of resources to run when you have a large voting population...
No, politicians can afford to spend lots of money on them. The actual mechanism of elections have never, so far as I know, been all that expensive pre-computation.
IAWYC, but the claims that most of the economic costs of elections are in political spending, and most of the costs of actually running elections are in voting machines are both probably wrong. (Public data is terrible, so I'm crudely extrapolating all of this from local to national levels.)
The opportunity costs of voting alone dwarf spending on election campaigns. Assuming that all states have the same share of GDP, that people who don't a full-state holiday to vote take an hour off to vote, that people work 260 days a year and 8 hours a day, and that nobody in the holiday states do work, then we get:
Political spending: 5.3 billion USD Opportunity costs of elections: 15 trillion USD (US GDP) * (9/50 (states with voting holidays) * 1/260 (percentage of work-time lost) + 41/50 (states without holidays) * 1/60 * 1/8 (percentage of work-time lost)) ≈ 16 billion USD
Extrapolating from New York City figures, election machines cost ~1.9 billion nationwide. (50 million for a population ~38 times smaller than the total US population.) and extrapolating Oakland County's 650,000 USD cost across the US's 3143 counties, direct costs are just over 2 billion USD. (This is for a single election; however, some states have had as many as 5 elections in a single year. The cost of the voting machines can be amortized over multiple elections in multiple years.)
(If you add together the opportunity costs for holding one general and one non-general election a year (no state holidays; around ~7 billion USD), plus the costs of actually running them, plus half the cost of the campaign money, the total cost/election seems to be around 30 billion USD, or ~0.002% of the US's GDP.)
Correction accepted. Still seems like something a poor society could afford, though, since labor and opportunity would also cost less. I understand that lots of poor societies do.
What? If anything I'd assume them to be more expensive before computers were introduced. In Italy where they are still paper based they have to hire people to count the ballots (and they have to pay them a lot, given that they select people at random and you're not allowed to refuse unless you are ill or something).
Why so? Usually when people can't refuse to do a job, they're paid little, not a lot.
Like jury duty. Yeah. Why would it be different in Greece?
http://aceproject.org/ace-en/focus/core/crb/crb03
"Low electoral costs, approximately $1 to $3 per elector, tend to manifest in countries with longer electoral experience"
That's a somewhat confusing comment. If they're effectively conscripted (them not being allowed to refuse), not really "hired" -- that would imply they don't need to be paid a lot...
Is that that little? I think many fewer people would vote if they had to pay $3 out of their own pocket in order to do so.
A law compelling people to do stuff would be very unpopular, unless they get adequate compensation. Not paying them much would just mean they would feign illness or something. (If they didn't select people by lot, the people doing that would be the ones applying for that job, who would presumably like it more than the rest of the population and hence be willing to do that for less.)
Well perhaps fewer people would vote if they had to pay a single cent out of their own pocket -- would that mean that 0.01$ isn't little either?
How much are these Italian ballot-counters being paid? Can we quantify this?
IIRC, something like €150 per election. I'll look for the actual figure.
According to Wikipedia, the 2005 elections in germany did cost 63 million euros, with a population of 81 million people. 0,78 eurocent per person or the 0,00000281st part of the GDP. Does not seem much, in the grander scheme of things. And since the german constitutional court prohibited the use of most types of voting machines, that figure does include the cost to the helpers; 13 million, again, not a prohibitive expenditure.
In the UK, the counters are volunteers.