And even though polls closed at 8 CST, there’s been some sort of glitch and we’re still waiting for returns. Will have to wait for the morning paper.
Can you explain this. In New York City, the public school system is now run by mayoral appointees, but in the suburbs, the public school systems are divided into school districts, which are often unrelated to any municipality or municipal boundaries. In each school district, there would be an election for Board members and to approve the annual school budget. Typically, these were on different days from the November general elections. Private or religious schools were run individually (or by the diocese) with no public involvement or voting.
What province are you in, and how does the school division voting work? Do you get to choose which division you vote in? How are the school systems run and funded?
Thanks.
In the Canadian parliamentary system, there’s no absolute fixed date for either the federal or provincial systems, so it’s not possible to coordinate them that way. As well, the federal elections are run by the federal government, and the provincial ones are run by the provincial governments, so that would also make coordination difficult.
In fact, the Saskatchewan election was originally going to be in the fall of 2015, but when the Feds dropped the writ in August 2015 for a fall election, the provincial government moved the provincial election to the spring of 2016, so they wouldn’t overlap.
I’m in suburban Cook County, Illinois (yes, yes, jokes about the dead voting are allowed, and expected 
).
My polling place is in the cafeteria at a Catholic grade school, about a half-mile from my house. It handles several precincts, and even when I get to the polling place just after opening (around 6am), it’s busy, and it largely stays busy all day.
I should note that, when I first moved to this neighborhood, 20 years ago, my polling place was about 2 blocks away from the current one – in the garage at a private residence! The county changed the rules about where polling places could be, a few years later, and that’s when it moved to the school.
Anyway, you get to the polling place, find the right table for your precinct, and then check in with an election judge who has a big printed ledger of every registered voter for the precinct. You sign your line on the ledger, and they give you your ballot.
SeaDragonTattoo has already described Cook County voting; it’s pretty much the same in my precinct. I think that they started adding electronic voting about 10 years ago, with touchscreen terminals. They’re still slowly adding electronic machines, and you’re given the option of a paper ballot, or using a touchpad, when you check in. As SeaDragonTattoo notes, there’s often a line for the touchscreens.
I’m in Saskatchewan - due north of Texas. (Way north. 
)
School divisions aren’t tied to the municipalities in any way. They’re a separate form of local government, set up by provincial law. The boundaries of the divisions are not required to be co-terminus with municipal boundaries, even for the larger cities.
Municipalities and school divisions are both elected under the authority of a provincial law regulating local government elections. The municipalities run the elections for the municipalities and the school divisions, through administrative agreements and cost-shares.
The reason for the separate schools is that under the Canadian Constitution, in some provinces the Protestant or roman Catholic minorities are guaranteed the right to have separate schools under their control, but with all the powers of a public school, including taxation. If you are a member of the minority faith, you can vote for the separate school. If not, you vote for the public school.
Oh yeah, forgot about signing the ledger - one day I should bring a big feathered quill to sign with! What century are we in??
No kidding. 
When I moved to Illinois from Wisconsin in '89, I was surprised to find paper ballots, since I’d seen voting machines (the booths with the levers) in Wisconsin since I’d been a little kid. My understanding is that, at some point, Illinois decided that voting machines were too easy to tamper with, and mandated a return to the lower-tech (but harder to tamper with) paper ballots.
I don’t think so. NYC was one of the last, and toward the end they were having to scrounge around for parts to repair machines. But they delayed replacing them because they need a lot of machines, and that would have cost a lot. I think that the machines finally got too old & too expensive to repair any more.
Minnesota has a law allowing districts to do vote-by-mail. But it excludes the larger cities in the state from doing so. Oddly enough, those areas vote strongly Democratic. But I’m sure that had nothing to do with why that’s in the law. :dubious:
You can’t. Just like most of the electronic machines – all you can do is re-read the counters. (Some electronic machines produce a written receipt, but it has problems:
- it’s not machine readable, so a recount would require teams of people to read each one and tally them up (and these paper receipts are difficult to read & error prone.)
- the hardware that produces the paper receipt is different than the vote counter – a hacker could code these to record the vote for one candidate but print a different one on the paper receipt. (And it tests, that has been shown.)
Funny. We once had power go off at a polling place on election day. But people continued to fill out their paper ballots, by candlelight. (It was in a church basement, candles were readily available.)
The ballots themself have a bar-code type marking on them to identify for the scanner the district, candidates, and their order on the ballot. Here in Minnesota, even within a single voting precinct, the printed ballots differ from 1 voter to the nest – state law requires that the order of candidate names on the ballot be rotated.
Minneapolis, Minnesota. (I’m an election judge here.)
Pretty similar to the OP, using paper ballots. Except:
- we don’t have signatures in the poll books; just have to sign a blank space next to your name. Those books are still paper here – the rest of the county has converted to electronic pads to lookup & sign. We are by far the biggest art of the county, so they want to work out the bugs elsewhere before converting us.
- most of our polling places have only one precinct voting there – only a few have 2 or 3. Most have only a single scanner to accept ballots.
- we have lots of people who prefer to use a table rather than the voting booths, because those are too flimsy, or there’s a waiting line for them, or they prefer to sit down while filling out the ballot.
- we offer the privacy folders to every voter, but many refuse them. They seem to take it as a point of pride they they “aren’t afraid for anyone to know who they’re voting for”.
- every polling place also has a big electronic machine with touchscreen, joystick, or keys, wheelchair accessible, with multiple languages, and earphones & voice reader. This is available for anyone to use in filling out their ballot, but is mostly used by people with disabilities. They insert their paper ballot, select their choices on the machine, and it prints them onto the ballot. Then they take the ballot over to the scanner and insert it like all the others. (We have to watch that people don’t forget them in the printing machine.)
It’s inside the little administrative hut in the middle of the playground.
Australia, NSW, federal electorate of Reid.
There are 36 polling places across the electorate, many are within the grounds of public schools.
There are 4 within a 5 minute walk from my home. Each processes 2-3,000 voters during the day.
Elections are held on Saturday and the polling places are open from 8am-6pm
You dodge or collect the parties how to vote cards as you feel inclined outside the school grounds on the way in. There is no electioneering allowed inside the school grounds.
If you pick your time well you shouldn’t need to queue more than a minute.
You are greeted at the hall door by an usher which directs you to the next free polling officer.
There is no queuing inside the polling place.
You give your name to the polling officer, who checks your name against the roll. When they locate it they ask to confirm your address. They also ask if you have already voted. 
Assuming you say no they initial two ballot papers; one for the House of Reps which is typically 4-6 names on a yellow piece of paper about A6/A7 size and a white Senate ballot which is A0/A1 size. In some elections there may be a plebiscite which will be on a separate paper.
You move to a voting booth which are contructed of cardboard. There are about 4-5 times as many booths as officers. There your mark the papers with a provided HB pencil. Then fold the papers and stuff them into the ballot box, also made of cardboard. A supervisor watches you.
You then exit the polling place and usually congregate with peers around the sausage sizzle for a while.
The party staff don’t bother you when you are leaving the grounds and I have never seen an exit poll being conducted although Reid is currently classified as a swing electorate.
Here are the methods used by each state. I thought it was interesting that the old lever machines are now entirely discontinued nationwide.
In my Michigan precinct in our local elementary school, you walk in and fill out the application to vote. You can either show your ID or sign something that says you are who you say you are. She looks up your name and highlights your name in the voter list so you can’t vote again. She passes your ID and the application to the next person who scans your driver’s license and passes it to the next guy who records the number of the next blank ballot on your application, gives you the ballot with your application folded up in a pocket and off you go to the booth. You complete the ballot by completing the lines next to each of your selected candidates (or you can do straight ticket). Move on to the non-partisan (judicial) section and any proposals. Put the ballot back in the envelope and go to a table where the guy detaches the top of the ballot which contains the number, verifies that it matches the application, and stacks the application in a pile. Then you go to the reader machine, remove the ballot from the envelope and stick it in the scanner. Any errors will notify the official to help you out. If it reads cleanly, leave the envelope on the table and off you go.
I’m in NE Ohio. Early voting is being pushed hard by the Clinton campaign, but I enjoy the shared civic ritual of actually going someplace and voting in public with other voters. For a couple of years we had to drive to a nearby school to vote, but more recently, and very conveniently, we’ve voted in the basement of a church right across the street from our house.
You walk in and are directed to a table for your particular precinct and ward. You show some form of ID - for me, it’s my driver’s license - and sign a big Board of Elections computer-generated book with the names and scanned-in signatures of registered voters. You’re given a ballot sheet (or sheets, depending on how many offices or issues are up for grabs), and have your choice of little temporary booths in which to fill it/them out, filling the ovals with a black pen. Then you insert the sheet(s) into a scanner under the watchful eye of a pollworker. Sometimes you get an “I Voted” sticker afterwards, sometimes you don’t.
I always take some notes along with me as to which candidates in the more obscure races I’ve researched and decided to support.
Spain. Elections always take place on Sunday; you can vote in advance by certified mail. You request it, they send you all appropriate paperwork by certified mail, you send it back again certified, they send you a money order to pay you back.
Most elections include choosing your representatives: municipal, regional parliament and the lower chamber of the national parliament are “closed list”, so it’s preprinted and you choose the complete list. The senate is “open list”, so you get this big sheet of paper and can mark an X on up to N people (N varies by location, it’s 3 for us in Navarre). Each list goes into an envelope of the same color, each envelope into a transparent box with a lid of that same color.
You go to the polling place (in my case it can be at city hall or in the public library; two blocks away from each other), and there are cabins where you can fill your envelopes or you may bring them prepared from home. Get in line for your table (the listings are posted, in case you’ve forgotten), show ID (national ID, passport or driver’s license), the table’s secretary finds you in the list and draws a line across your name, the table’s president uncovers the slits at the tops of the boxes and you place your own vote inside. If you have a physical problem which makes it difficult for you to place the envelope in the box, another person can help you, but it can’t be the people who are part of the table’s triumvirate (president, secretary and vocal, I don’t know how to translate vocal; in other contexts it would be “someone who speaks up”). Each table is likely to have 4 or 5 people, with the extras being observers from political parties. The observers can give a hand with things such as moving boxes, assisting those voters with problems, reading ID for the secretary or helping keep the piles of papers from falling down, but are otherwise there mostly for decoration; unlike official table members, they take shifts (normally two hours).
I had the dubious pleasure to take my grandmother to vote in the unofficial referendum about the independence of Catalonia. I’m reasonably sure the rude cabbie wasn’t an official part of the process … We went to the polling place (a charter school very close to her house which is also used for regular elections), she got a paper with the two questions and had to mark an X on the appropriate choices. Since she couldn’t really see, I assisted her. There was no attempt made at secrecy at all; no curtained booths were available to mark your Xs in private.
Oh, I also have relatively-recent experience from Montana. The procedures were mostly the same as here in the Cleveland area (scan-tron paper ballots fed into a scanner on-site), but the polling places varied: My first year voting there, it was the Fish, Wildlife, and Game office, then the second time, it was the University’s basketball arena, and after that, it was the University’s football stadium (the indoor parts).
I’ve never personally seen a polling place that wasn’t some sort of government installation or another: When I was a kid, it was a public school about two blocks from my house (I think my mom still votes there). And I vaguely remember the big lever-machines, but they got rid of them when I was still very young.
Optical scan ballot, which I think is the best balance of convenience, security, and accountability. (That is, it is easy to use, the machine doesn’t have to be attached to the Internet, and you can easily do recounts.)
Southern California. I vote in a church social hall about 2 miles from home. Walk in, they find my name on the rolls, I sign, they give me the ballot. Into the voting “booth” and fill in an arrow for each candidate/proposition. Ballot goes back in the holder and into the ballot box by the door, where a lady hands me my “I voted” sticker. I’ve never waited more than a minute or two to vote.
Suburban Charleston, SC
Touchscreen at the local elementary school. The helpful woman checks my ID - or registration card if I can find it - when I get there. Then another helpful person walks me to the booth and I vote.
Interestingly, I’ve voted in six states now. This is the first one with a ‘party line’ voting option. Very top of the ballot ‘Vote all D’ or ‘Vote all R’. I find that very weird.
This has been a point of contention in Michigan. The Republican-controlled legislature and governor passed a law to ban straight party voting but it was overturned in court on the grounds that it would inhibit minority voting. The voting lines in the big cities are long enough, forcing people to mark individual races would slow things down leading to even longer lines and discourage voting. Republicans fear that having straight ticket options hurts them downballot, they’d rather that Democratic voters who sometimes turn out only for the presidential race would vote for the top of the ticket and stop.