I’m hardly an expert on election law, but I’m fairly sure that’s the case. State B can’t break its own laws on voting eligibility by using State A’s requirements.
Quoth ascenray:
Actually, whenever there are more than two candidates, it’s mathematically proven that there is no perfect election. That is to say, with three or more candidates, and any voting system, there is some scenario where it is in some voters’ best interest to not vote honestly. A simple example of this can be seen with two close candidates and a third party, such as Republicans, Democrats, and Greens in the U. S. A person might think that Ralph Nader is the best man for the job, but nonetheless vote for Gore or Kerry, just because he has a much better chance of beating Bush than does Nader. That voter must either “throw his vote away” or vote for a person whom he does not consider the best.
There are other formats for an election which avoid such problems sometimes, but there is no format for an election which can always avoid such problems.
But this is conflating election theory with actual election practise. When I say I want a perfect election, I mean that there should be policies in place to ensure that when a qualified voter intends goes to the poll, he or she is not prevented or discouraged from voting by the actions of election officials or by vigilantes, that the system will minimize errors on the part of the voter, and that the ballot will be counted as marked. It’s this process that should and can be improved.
It probably won’t suprise you to learn that after last night I have one or two more questions:
Why on earth were people forced to queue for hours to vote. Surely it’s not that complicated is it?
Provisional ballots - what’s all that about then?
If there’s a recount how do you recount electronic votes?
When will we know who’s won?
Thanks again.
Complicated, no. But the turnout for the election was dramatically higher in most areas than in other recent elections, meaning that many precincts did not have sufficient voting machines/poll workers/other resources. People also all tend to show up at the polls at the same times – first thing in the morning (before work), at lunchtime, and at the end of the day (after work). At my local polling place, there were several hundred people waiting when the polls opened at 7 am. By the time I voted at 11:45 am, there was effectively no line at all. I don’t know whether the reported seven to nine hour wait times in parts of Ohio and other states were caused primarily by volume, by problems with the voting machines, or some combination.
After the last election, when many voters reported being turned away from their polling place without being allowed to cast a ballot, election procedures were amended to include provisional ballots. Basically, the way things now work, if poll workers can’t verify that you’re a legitimate registered voter, instead of sending you away they now have to let you cast a “provisional ballot” that records your votes. These ballots are stored/counted separately from the others. Each provisional ballot has to be validated – i.e., the local election officials have to verify that the voter is registered and was voting in the correct precinct, etc., and then the legitimate ones are counted. In Ohio, there are about 175,000 provisional ballots pending, and the current margin for President Bush in that state is about 136,221 votes. Given that Bush won 51% of the non-provisional votes in Ohio, there’s very little chance that Kerry won 78% or more of the provisional ballots, and thus there’s almost no chance that the provisional ballots will change the outcome. But it’s mathematically possible, so the Kerry campaign hangs on to that possibility.
Depends on the technology used; as mentioned before, there are a lot of different systems in use. As far as I can tell, with the touch-screen voting system used here in Georgia, there is no provision for recounts.
I’ve heard that it may take up to 11 days to count all of the provisional ballots in Ohio. Presumably, it would only be necessary to count enough of the provisional ballots to establish that it’s mathematically impossible for the remaining ballots to change the outcome. Ohio’s the only state that really matters at this point; AFAIK, neither Iowa nor New Mexico have been “officially” called for Bush yet, but Bush has about a 16,000 vote lead in each state with over 99% of the vote counted in each, meaning that without Ohio, Bush has a 266-to-252 electoral vote lead. Whoever gets Ohio’s 20 electoral votes wins. So as soon as something happens that settle Ohio, it settles the election as a whole.
owlstretchingtime, I am an election official, and I can describe to you the conditions in the voting ward for which I was deputized. We had a staff of ten people. Four staffers registered those voters who were registering at the polls. Four staffers verified that those voters who said that they were already registered, were indeed registered at their current address. Two of us staffers ran around between those groups to solve problems.
Between 7 and 8 a.m., we had a line of about a hundred registered voters waiting for verification before getting their ballots. Yes, we could have used twice as many staffers for times like that, but we aren’t budgeted for it. And there were other times during the day, such as between 6 and 8 p.m., when it was so slow we were doing crossword puzzles between voters.
In my younger, poorer, more desperate days I too have been a polling clerk (someone who works in the polling station handing out the ballots etc)
This is how it works here:
Voter has a voting card delivered to his house telling him the location and opening times of the poll.
Voter takes self and card to polling statioon (card is actually optional - but it makes life easier - otherwise you may be asked to prove who you are (you usually aren’t).
Voters name is crossed off electoral roll and ballot paper(s) given.
Voter goes to little booth and places pencil cross by selection(s) of choice.
Voter puts ballot in big tin box.
Voter goes home.
Voter gets on with life.
Total time taken about 5mins.
I have never seen a queue at a British polling station (and we have higher turnouts for our equivelent elections). Polling clerk is quite possibly the dullest job in the world as you usually have absolutely nothing to do.
I think you will find that the rest of the world is amazed that the nation that can build stealth bombers and get cheese in an aerosol can’t organise an election.
Well, that’s sort of the problem right there, innit? There was no reason cheese needed to be in an aerosol can in the first place, was there? It’s not that hard to take a knife, cut off a piece of cheese, and put it on a cracker. But some wiseacre had to come along and try to “improve” things. Likewise with voting. Paper ballots? Somebody has to manually count those things. Pshaw. We’re Americans – we’re ingenious. We’ll come up with a better way! So we’ve come up with not one but several “better ways”. Sure, some people have to wait hours in line to use a voting machine instead of just dropping a paper ballot in a box, but their votes are electronically counted – that’s gotta be better, right?
In my state, the main determinant of whether you have a queue is whether you have enough election officials at the poll to verify that the voters are registered at their current address. The staff at my poll was doubled from previous elections, and that was still not enough at rush hours. Yet it was twice too many at slow hours.
[QUOTE=owlstretchingtime]
Voter takes self and card to polling statioon (card is actually optional - but it makes life easier - otherwise you may be asked to prove who you are (you usually aren’t).
Voters name is crossed off electoral roll and ballot paper(s) given.
Voter goes to little booth and places pencil cross by selection(s) of choice.
Voter puts ballot in big tin box.
Voter goes home.
Voter gets on with life.
Total time taken about 5mins.
[\QUOTE]
Well, for starters on my ballot there were 26 different items to vote on, and some (such as school boards) could have multiple votes. Just to mark that many items, and to make sure that you didn’t make a mistake, takes five or ten minutes.
Second, the sign-in procedure is a little more involved than what you described. I am in California, and here the poll worker has to find our name in two different books: One ordered by name, and the other by address. In the one by name we have to write our current address in the space provided and sign our name. In the one by address the poll worker crosses the name off the list. Just to sign in took about three minutes.
But the biggest bottleneck was the lack of polling machines. We had ten in our precinct, and there was always a line to wait to use one.
Ed
To the Limeys: What’s your backup plan if the voter does not appear on the electoral roll? Often somebody has moved and not told us (the Board of Elections), or married and changed her name, etc. Do you have some way to let these folks vote and have their votes set aside to be counted later? We had ten (out of 341 voters) of thse ‘affadavit’ ballots on Tuesday.
What do handicapped or visually impaired people do?
How many pollworkers do you usually have and are they as hard to find as they are here? (It was estimated America needed about 2 million and I think they were half a mil short. We had 3 instead of 4 people at our table.)
And do you still use the paper ballots if you have, in addition to the MP, the local councillors, dogcatcher, Town Crier, and various initiatives on things like bonds and new stadiums and changes in law? Is there a seperate piece of paper for each person or issue and don’t they add up fast?
Nope, they don’t add up fast - because we don’t get to vote for most of those things. In a General Election you get to vote for your MP. That’s it. Sometimes there will be a local election at the same time when you will get to vote for your local councillor. Now we are all the way up to two and I don’t recall ever having more than that. We don’t vote directly for bond issues or law changes or whether marriage should be between a man and a woman or anything like that. We don’t vote for judges and tax commissioners and school board members. We vote for people who, rightly or wrongly, make those decisions and appointments for us.
No, but, so long as you inform the local council, the amendments can be made to the register at the beginning of every month. Even although British general elections can be called at short notice, there is really no excuse for someone not to be correctly registered. And if you’re moving house, you ought to be contacting the local council anyway about your local taxes. If they know that you’re changing address, they’ll remind about amending the electoral register. None of this is voluntary. All eligible voters are required to register and the councils are obliged to keep the register as complete as possible. So if you’re not properly registered on the day, it’s tough luck.
They can appoint a proxy to vote for them, either in person or by post.
UK voters vote on far fewer matters than their US counterparts. Most officials who are directly elected in the USA are only appointed (albeit by elected bodies such as Parliament or the local council). It is also extremely rare for voters to be asked to vote on specific measures. Again, those are usually decided by elected bodies. So, in most cases, you are only voting on one or two matters on any given polling day. Which is why it’s separate ballot papers (of different colours) which go in separate ballot boxes. The whole process should take no more than a couple of minutes and queues are pretty much unknown.
It should also be said that the present government has been experimenting with alternative systems, such as electronic voting or all-postal ballots, with somewhat mixed results.
Name on Electoral Roll If your name isn’t on the roll you ain’t got a vote. That’s it. It is a criminal offence not to be on the electoral roll and it is the voter’s responsibility to make sure they are (in fact i don’t think anyone has ever been prosecuted for not registering - but they could be. This law was enacted to stop people “opting out” of the poll tax. The tax has gone but the law remains)
If you’ve moved you will be registered at your old address and can ask for a postal vote if it’s too far to travel.
Polling workers these are usually local authority staff and it is considered quite a perk. They get paid about £150 for the day and they also receive their pay for that day from their employer. There’s no shortage of takers.
Handicapped etc The polling stations are all wheelchair accessible and the polling clerks can help the blind.
Paper ballots At the moment it is almost entirely paper-based. There have been a few modish attempts to try other things like internet voting, but frankly when we see the rickett that the US makes of things, there’s no real desire to change a system that works.
We did try to introduce machine-countable ballot papers for the Mayor of London election - but the machines broke down. Nuff said.
Also we don’t elect as many people as you. In my case I elect: Local MP; Local euro MP; Borough Councillor and Mayor of London. That’s it - not dog catcher or library officials etc
Now this is interesting. I believe that in most U.S. states, it’s illegal to vote in a precinct that you have moved out of.
This is a big difference. On Nov. 2, I cast ballots for:
- Presidential electors
- U.S. representative (this would roughly be equivalent to your member of Parliament)
- one member of the county board (roughly equivalent to borough councillor) - there are actually five members of the board, but elections for the five seats are staggered so that you don’t vote for all of them at once
- two members of the five-member school board (again, their terms are staggered)
- a proposed amendment to the Virginia constitution regarding apportionment and redistricting with regard to U.S. House of Representatives seats
- a proposed amendment to the Virginia constitution regarding succession to the governorship in case of disasters and deaths
- about five or six levy issues regarding spending on local infrastructure, schools, etc.
Next year, we’ll be voting for the Virginia governor, members of the Virginia House of Delegates (which in most other states would be called the House of Representatives), and members of the Virginia Senate.
In the UK you have the right to vote. However the electoral roll is only taken once a year so it is a snapshot of who’s where at any given time (it’s happening right now where I live). That is where you are entitled to vote.
So if you move then your right to vote stays where you were registered, you would have to register in the next electoral roll revision.
Also on the number of ballots – these are often totally separate ie we have elections for Parliament; the Euro boondoggle; councils etc on separate days so we rarely have more than one ballot paper (sometimes they will combine two if they fall close together for cost reasons)
Around here, you have a 60-day grace period in which, as a courtesy, you can vote one last time at your old address. But before you can get a ballot you will have to fill out a change of address which will cancel your registration at the old place after the election.
Furthermore, if you change precincts but not towns/townships, there is no limit to the grace period. You can still vote even if it’s been over 60 days. You still need to fill out the change of address form.
As for what takes so long–our bottlenecks occurred at different places. At times it was because we did not have enough booths. At times it was because the machine which tabulated the paper ballots was jamming. At times we did not have enough privacy sleeves (what keeps the ballot private as you walk it from station to station). We were able to address the other issues but our clerk would not give us more privacy sleeves. Having a limited number of sleeves mean that only a limited number of ballots will be out “on the floor” at a time. That’s important so that they can be accounted for, and so that all voters with ballots can be properly directed through the last staged of the voting process.
Do you not see how unbelievable this seems to an outsider?
Voting machines; privacy sleeves etc.
Just get yourselves a big tin box!