How do you actually vote in your locality?

Politics & Elections
21

In Minnesota it’s similar to the OP, except there isn’t a scanned version of your signature. No photo ID requirement either, just state your name and sign on the line for your name.

The school or church (the two most common choices) are for one particular precinct at a time, so you’d better show up at the right place, although they can look which precinct to go to based on your street address.

The 8x17" ballot has oval bubbles which are then inserted into the the scanning machine. We have the privacy envelopes as well.

For a while the ballots had incomplete arrows that looked like:
= =>
that you filled in to look like
===>

22

That conjures quite the visual image. Do you have little candles under them to make them float on the breeze over to the county clerk’s office?

The latter is preferable: drop them off at the big white box on Tuesday evening, and the nice man in the glowy vest gives you a cookie.

The franchise-restrictivists object to that. They suggest that your abusive spouse or domineering parent will force you to vote a certain way. Or somesuch nonsense. And, of course, it disenfranchises the homeless.

23

You look at the counter again.

This is how it works with electronic machines too. They plug the machines in and get the data again. (Some of those do generate a paper record, but AFAIK those are only used in the most extreme circumstances. An ordinary recount just means checking the machine again.)

24

Texas voter here, from South Texas. I’m not sure if the machines in Dallas and Amarillo are the same as the ones here, but here is how the ones in Corpus Christi work. When you arrive you present your ID and the poll worker prints out a small slip with a 4 digit code. When you get to the machine you enter the code using a dial. The first option is voting straight ticket, Republican, Democratic, Libertarian, or Green in that order. If you select straight ticket you have to scroll past the individual races with the dial or a right arrow button to get to the referendums. The last screen shows all your selections and then you press a cast ballot button. As far as touch screens, I didn’t try touching it and as far as I can tell the screen is not touch screen.

25

My voting precinct uses fill-in-the-bubble ballots which are normally scanned by a machine.

But I live overseas and did everything electronically. I submitted my ballot request via email a few months ago. About a month ago I got the ballot as a PDF file via email. And last night I completed my ballot (coverted PDF to bmp. Fill in dots using MS Paint. Convert back to PDF.) and emailed it back.

26

I’ve never been personally involved with a recount, but I have been there when they opened the machines at the end of the voting day. In the back of each machine were rows of counters, which looked like old-style automobile odometers. When the machines were unsealed, it would lock the counters into place so they couldn’t be advanced. Then the election workers would tally the votes for the various candidates, announce them to everyone present, and record them on the necessary paperwork.

My understanding is that after the election, the Board of Elections would retain the machines with the counters locked for some period of time. If there were a recount, the recount officials (and representatives of the parties/candidates) would go to each of the machines and check that each of the correct counts for the candidates were tallied, along with reviewing absentee and affidavit ballots (those cast by hand when there was a question about whether someone was properly registered).

The lever machines were introduced in 1892, and their use continued in New York City through the 2010 Congressional elections. Before the 2000 Florida Presidential election vote counting debacle, nobody much thought about voting technology. And after the reforms passed thereafter, because the lever machines were such a mature and effective technology, there was very little concern about the machines being a cause of problems or inaccuaracies.

27

Cook County (Chicago) - both precincts I’ve lived in since 2000 have used a church for their polling place. Currently the local Catholic church basement. Two precincts vote there, one goes left and the other goes right. Ballots are large, like 9x14 or something, and often 2-sided. Black marker is used to “finish the center of the arrow” pointing at the candidate you want. Then scan it by inserting into a machine which then drops the ballot into a secured box underneath, and all with an election judge standing there to watch you. Once the machine says it’s good, you get a little slip of paper to prove you voted.

A few fully electronic machines have been rolled out, but there’s been a line waiting for those in the last two elections I’ve been to, while there’s no line for the little privacy-screened tables to fill out the paper, so I’ve kept using paper.

28

Saskatoon, Saskatchewan

For provincial and federal elections, we use paper ballots. Mark an X in the space beside your choice (you’re only making a single choice - representative for your riding), and the ballots are counted by hand after the polls close.

Just voted in the municipal election today after work. Three selections (mayor, council, school board), using OCR ballots fed into a scanner. Poll worker commented about not having to spend a couple hours afterwards counting.

29

Is it magic marker now? The last time I voted at a polling place, we were just using black ball point pen. I have been permanent absentee for 6 years and we fill out our ballots with black ball point pen.

30

South Africa here; I actually work in the operations department of a political party, so I have become intimately familiar with our process.

Election day is always a Wednesday, and always a public holiday; the voting stations open from 7am to 7pm. There are three checks to prevent voter identity fraud: first an electronic scan of your national ID card at the entrance or in the queue; then your name is crossed off of a paper list of voters for that station; and finally a ink mark is made on your thumb. (The marked thumb also serves as a token that you’ve voted; “thumb selfies” are popular on election day.)

Each ballot is a simple list, in which you make an “X” next to the party or candidate of choice. (National and provincial elections are party-list PR so you only vote for a party; local elections are mixed-member PR so you vote for a party on one ballot paper and a candidate on another.) There are cardboard booths so you can vote in secret; then you fold the ballot and drop it into a ballot box.

Once voting is finished, the ballots are hand-counted by election workers, who are watched by party agents and independent observers. Basically they put all the ballots on a table in a giant heap, then divide the ballots into separate piles for each party/candidate, and count the piles. The returning officer fills out two copies of a form with the results, posts one on the door of the voting station for the public to see, and takes the other one to the local electoral office. There it gets captured into a computer system, and eventually appears on the big board at election HQ.

The voting and counting is completely paper-based and manual. But it works for us because we only vote on one or two things at a time - we have a parliamentary system where we only vote for legislators, not for executive positions or referendums/initiatives.

31

Suburb in Oklahoma, same as Sea Dragon Tattoo with markers and arrows. We have had the same system for as long as I have been voting, some 30 + years. You get an I Have Voted sticker and sometimes a cookie when you’re done. I’ve voted in an elementary school, Methodist church, a Jewish community center, a Catholic Church, a Baptist Church and a non-denominational church respectively.

32

Rural Wisconsin here. Go to the local township hall, report in and identify myself to the clerks (some of whom I’ve known for over 50 years). They give me a paper ballot, I take it to a booth, and use the special marker pencil to connect the arrows to the desired candidates. Then I slip it into the electronic reader machine.

33

In Dallas County, it’s still paper ballots and machine readers.

I basically drive the 400 yards up the street to the elementary school and go into the gym, where there are two or three people running the voting station. I show them my ID, and they look me up in the list of registered voters for the precinct. I then sign my name in the book next to where it is listed.

They then hand me a paper ballot, and I then go to one of the booths (terrible flimsy folding things) and fill out the bubbles with a fine-point black Sharpie marker.

Then when I’m done, I take it over to the enormous gray machine reader and put the ballot in- it does its thing and shows another vote on the tally. I don’t see the ballot anymore.

Then I leave the gym and head to work.

34

Oregon here. Vote by mail is how we do it. Surprisingly but happily, both parties support the process. Fill in the bubbles with black or blue pen, seal the ballot into its “anonymous” envelope if you choose, then either mail it in or drop it at a designated collection box. I’ve never gotten a cookie when dropping it off. Ballots are counted by machine and the paper records are retained for a period of time in case a recount is required. You can also go online and verify that your ballot was in fact counted.

Years ago I was an election official in San Luis Obispo County in California as part of my responsibilities as a civil servant for the courts. Usually I was assigned to collect ballots from outlying precincts, escorted by a Sheriff’s deputy, and deliver them to the main courthouse for counting. That was pretty fun. The deputies were always court bailiffs from prior rotations, so we knew each other and had a great time catching up as we drove around the county until late into the night.

Once I was assigned to the dreaded Tweezer Detail. At the time, the ballots were not cut as clean as they are today. In order to be sure they cleared the counting machines without issue, we had to tweeze any stray slivers of paper off the edges before they were counted. I never bitched about any election job to which I was assigned after Tweezer Detail.

Am definitely a fan of mail-in voting.

35

Paper ballots that get scanned

36

Georgia voter here. Voted early, also known as “in person absentee” as in a few other states.

Voted at the Board of Education, showed my driver’s license, signed a form verifying my address, was given a yellow credit card-looking thingy, went to the machine and stuck it in, made my selections on the touch screen, hit submit, turned in my fake credit card, got my sticker, bada-boom bada-bing!

37

Pretty much the same as Gorsnak. Municipal elections are governed by provincial laws, but I think the municipalities can choose between hand-counted ballots and machine count.

Since we’re in a major city, all the info about voting, wards, polling stations and candidates’ statements were on-line. That’s new this cycle. Last election, we got a paper booklet in the mail a couple of weeks before election.

So Mrs Piper and I went on-line to find out where we went to vote and who the candidates were. Polling division was at the neighbourhood Anglican Church a few blocks away. There was actually a line-up, which I don’t remember normally happens (turn-out for municipal elections is normally low).

First step was we got a sheet to fill out, attesting that we were Canadian citizens, had lived in the municipality for six months, confirmed our address. I attested that I vote in the Public School Division and Mrs Piper that she is a voter in the Catholic Separate School Division. Had to show the poll worker our photo ID (provincial Driver’s Licences).

Then we took the sheets to another poll worker, and signed them in front of her as a statutory declaration, which she witnessed.

She gave us each a ballot in an envelope. They’re the bubble ballots for electronic scanners.

I got the ballot for mayor, city councillor, and public school division. Mrs Piper got the ballot for mayor, city councillor and separate school division.

The mayor election is at large for the entire city. There were four candidates: (1) the incumbent (backed by business); (2) a challenger with union support (brother of a former mayor); (3) a very lefty-green university prof, who regularly runs in the mayor elections; and (4) a playwright-bare-breast advocate.

Councillors are elected one per ward. We had about four candidates in our ward. I winnowed them down by webpage: if they didn’t have a personal webpage, I wasn’t interested if they didn’t even have the resources to put together a website. To me, that’s an indicator that they hadn’t really worked to put together a coalition of supporters.

For the public school division, it’s also a ward system. There were
four candidates in my division. For the separate school division, it’s an at-large system. There were about 24 candidates for (I think) 8 seats.

Once we’d marked our ballots behind privacy shields, we put them back in the envelopes and took them to a third poll worker. She fed them into the scanner while we watched. It showed one more ballot each time, and out we went.

(Just to clarify one point from Gorsnak: we have separate elections for the Feds, the provinces, and the municipalities. We voted for the federal Parliament last October, and for the provincial government last spring.)

38

Sitting watching the returns. The incumbent mayor is leading by 68% in the first returns. Haven’t seen any council or school division returns yet.

39

And now they’re interviewing a guy who looks like he just graduated from high school, going on about the need for better skate parks. Turns out he’s running for council.

40

In the U.S., our elections are mostly consolidated. For instance, I just voted on federal, state, and municipal officials for the November 8 election. That’s one reason our ballots are so long.