Do you not see how unbelievable this seems to an outsider?
Voting machines; privacy sleeves etc.
Just get yourselves a big tin box!
Most of us are not particularly concerned with how it seems to an outsider. For that matter, don’t believe everything you read about what a “rickett” the election procedures here are. (I have to confess that is a new word for me.) The only places you hear about on the news are the ones where there were problems; having everything work as planned doesn’t generate any headlines.
When I went to vote, it took a grand total of maybe ten minutes. One minute in line to check in, two minutes while waiting for a place at a voting machine, maybe two more minutes while the nice man explained how to work the machine. (It didn’t take a genius to figure out, but he was on such a roll it seemed a shame to interrupt him.) Throw in another five minutes to actually vote and you have your ten minutes. There were some people here who had to wait in a long line – it mainly seemed to depend on what time of day you went.
That said, there was another precinct in town where they had people waiting in line long after the pollls were supposed to have been closed. I think they had a shortage of poll workers.
RR
Well, it’s a herculean task to tally the results for 15 or more races on one ballot. Essentially, we do have a big box. Only it’s hard plastic, instead of tin, and instead of just dropping it in, you feed it through a special scanner at the top first.
It seems just as strange, to Americans, that your local officials are appointed and not elected.
As for your “tin box” suggestion, how would that improve anything? It would be s step backward, not forward. Keep in mind, once again, that a typical ballot in a presidential election contains 20 or more elections, from U.S. president/vice president down to local school boards and municipal judges and referenda. The electronic vote tabulators used in my state are excellent: they instantly scan the ballot after it is inserted into the machine by the voter, and tabulate every race. They spit out any mis-vote (for example, voting for two different candidates for president) so that the voter can get a new ballot and try again, and they sort separately any ballots that contain write-in candidates (which are later manually tabulated by election officials).
It’s the hand tabulating of votes that takes up much time. When the polls closed at 8 p.m., I pressed a few buttons on the vote tabulator machine, and it printed out totals for all races. Should there be any questions about the tabulation, the paper ballots are in a bin inside the tabulator, still available to be rescanned (or manually tabulated).
But in a separate bin are the ballots with the write-in candidates. It took over a half hour to tabulate those by hand, and they formed only about a tenth of the total votes. (And most were asinine votes for football players, dead people, Mickey Mouse, etc. Ho ho ho, aren’t they funny.)
As RiverRunner said, you seem to be getting the impression of widespread chaos at U.S. polls, when that’s hardly the case. Precincts and occasions where there are problems will always get more publicity than the 90% of the time voting goes without a problem.
You keep repeating this as if the Presidential election is the only thing that’s going on and should be the only thing that’s going on. It’s not. It’s Election Day and that means that all the other elections that would be held in any case have a presidential election added on top.
It’s totally silly, from our point of view, to have many separate election days just because this is a presidential election year. All the elections are meaningful and many will have much more immediate impact on the ordinary voter. It’s the other added elections that create the need for mechanized or electronic tabulation.
You didn’t post in this other voting thread, so you may not have seen it. But I gave a long explanation of why a tin box just won’t work in America. Post #22. Please read it.
We had tons of races on our ballot too and over 3200 voters total, but when I took the key at 9:02 pm and moved the 1960s-style Hulking Gray Machine o’ Freedom’s lever to the CLOSED position, the little numbers popped right up and me and Andy and Bridey had them copied spread out on a table for the pollwatchers to rush up and contemplate by 9:10. By 9:25 they, along with all the other machines’ results, were in the arms of the Mandatory cop on their way to the county HQ on the Grand Councourse. Three sheets of paper for each machine. That’s what it all boiled down too.
By 10:15 Channel 5 was reporting the results for our Assembly District.
So, not too bad, huh? Better than having a bunch of people sitting around all night chatting and counting X’s.
Here in the U.K. the fact that you were voting for lots of other things really didn’t get mentioned very much.
BTW There’s an informal competition as to which constituency announces its ballot results first. Some of them are very quick, despite being peper-based. Some constituencies like to use bank clerks for the count as they are used to rapidly counting pieces of paper. And we generally know the result by the morning. Of course, our consituencies are generally rather smaller than your States 
In 2000, lots of voters were not on the roll. They did not get a vote. And the Democrats filed lawsuits accusing the Republicans of trying to disenfranchise minorities.
A criminal offense not to register to vote? Most Americans would consider that rather Orwellian. In the US, it’s technically the citizen’s responsibility to make sure that he is registered in his county of residence. And it is the citizen’s responsibility to go to the proper polling place. But if he claims to be registered, and his name is not on the roll, the media will accuse the poll workers of trying to rig the elecion
In my county, the ballot was a Scantron form and the tin box was a scanning machine, but otherwise, the procedure was identical. And 90+ % of the time, it works without a problem. The voting card is optional here, too. As a matter of fact, in my state, the law explicitly forbids poll workers from asking for ID. If they have John Smith on the roll, and I claim to be John Smith, the poll worker is required to take my word for it. The Democrats claim that this prevents minority voters from intimidation. The Republicans say that it makes “cemetary polling” easier.
That last paragraph should say “The Democrats claim that this protects minority voters from intimidation” or “The Democrats claim that this prevents minority voters from being intimidated”.
The reason that it is mandatory to appear on the electoral roll is that the Roll is the basis of, for instance, local taxation.
It ism’t mandatory to vote (as it is in Australia). As it happens I agree with you that it is a bit sinister.
Also as has been discussed elsewhere - we don’t disenfranchise people.
The only people who don’t get a vote are serving prisoners and those in mental institutions, and the Royal Family (insert mental institution joke here).
Over here, the tax rolls and the voter rolls are separate entities. The federal, state, county, and local tax agencies each keep their own rolls. And they don’t share information with ANYBODY…not even the police, without a court order.
Voter rolls are mostly kept by the County Clerk’s Office. When you move, you are supposed to register in your new county. Your new County Clerk is supposed to notify your old County Clerk, so that you will be purged from the rolls in your old county.
If you die, your death certificate is recorded with the County Clerk, who is supposed to purge you from the rolls. If you are declared insane, or convicted of a felony, you get purged. Also, if you don’t vote in a General Election, you get purged, and have to re-register.
If they accidentally purge the wrong name, however, they can get into big trouble. So, many clerks will simply wait until after a General Election, and then purge the no-shows. That way, their backside is protected even if you are still alive.
So, come election day, the rolls will likely contain the names of many people who are not actually going to show up. And so, losing candidates often suspect their opponents of “cemetary polling”.
Where is “over here”? Your location is blank. In many U.S. states, voter rolls and tax rolls are public documents.
In the states I’ve lived in there’s a board of elections, separate from the county clerk, who handles this stuff.
Walloon: I have read that the IRS doesn’t like giving out info unless they suspect you of cheating on your taxes. I had assumed that agencies at the lower levels had similar policies.
acsenray: I am in New Mexico. Our board of elections oversees the polling, but the county clerks are the custodians of public records.
When I registered to vote, it was in the county clerk’s office.
When they mailed out the cards telling where the polling places were this year, it came from the county clerk’s office.
And when I decided to vote early, I went to the county clerk’s office to do so.
Tax assessor records are public documents in 47 states (including DC). Maine, Rhode Island, Vermont, and New Mexico are the exceptions.
About felons: in NY, a felon is defined as someone who is convicted of a crime carrying a one year prison sentence. And, yes, speeding, drunk and disorderly, urinating in public, etc., things of that nature, are violations. That means that they aren’t even misdemeanors (up to a year in jail). Violations are usually punishable by just a fine (although it can be pretty hefty), or, if you’re imprisoned, for up to 15 days. Misdemeanors include things like minor assaults - say punching someone out in a bar or something - or pickpocketing.
You might have noticed that I said 1 year in prison, and up to a year in jail. That’s because in NY, prison is the state-run institution where you go to serve felony time, and the jails are local, run by the county. But that’s a bit off topic.
Anyway, it’s really called disenfranchisement (not debarring or disbarring - that happens to us lawyer-types when we get caught with our hands in the cookie jar), and it’s considered by some states to be a further punishment for having committed a felony.
Part of the confusion over all the voting comes from the nature of this country - it is made up of 50 different states, who each have their own rules about elections, ballots, disenfranchisement, etc. In some states, the counties get to decide this stuff to a certain extent, which is why in Florida, some people were still voting on the dreaded punch cards, chads and all, and others using touch screen voting.
It would be so much simpler if we amended the constitution to eliminate the electoral college (an incredibly stupid system) and made elections federally controlled.
More to the point about turnout being low is this whole stupid registration system we have. In case you didn’t know about this one, this is where at some time prior to the election (usually a month, although in some states, the same day) you have to register to vote. If you don’t do this, you can’t vote.
It seems to me that we should use the indelible ultraviolet ink that developing countries use to avoid this bit of stupidity.