How do you actually vote in your locality?

Politics & Elections
61

Interestingly enough, that’s how the schools are run in Texas as well. We have “independent” school districts, meaning that they don’t answer to anyone but the State. Municipalities and counties have no actual jurisdiction to meddle in their affairs, and their officials are elected in their own elections.

In addition, the boundaries don’t respect county or municipal boundaries; for example, my house is in Dallas, but is within the boundaries of the Richardson ISD, which is nominally the school district of the suburban town a few miles north of where I live. And RISD actually overlaps part of Collin County in its northernmost reaches, I believe.

So we pay separate school taxes from our city and county taxes, and vote on all that stuff separately.

62

Actually, come to think of it, there was one notable difference in procedure between Montana and Ohio: In Montana, the mailing that you get telling you where your polling place is is itself an acceptable form of ID at the polls, whereas here, it’s not. In both cases, though, there’s a long list of other forms of acceptable ID, including a recent utility bill, pay stub, or bank statement.

63

School taxes and funding are in a state of transition here. It used to be that school divisions had an independent power to tax, but the provincial government has been gradually centralizing school taxes to ensure that all schools and kids get equitable funding, regardless of the resources of the local community, as reflected on assessment rolls. An increasing amount of the school funding is coming from the provincial government.

64

Los Angeles County uses Ink-A-Vote. Decent description here:

The “special marking pen” has a retractable tip, so there is a tactile/audible click when the tip fits through the template and contacts the paper.
My precinct runs your ballot through the PBC to check for under/overvotes - I don’t know what they do/say if you, say, leave a race blank. (Might be an issue this year.)
We also have vote by mail no questions asked. I believe it’s the same ballot - no laminated ballot book or template or special pen, obviously.

65

I go into a rural elementary school gym, show my ID at the check-in desk, and am asked to state my name and address. They have printouts where they check my name and then mark it as “voted” (I assume.) I am handed a piece of paper which I walk over and hand to the machine operator. They take me to a free touchscreen voting machine, it looks like a flatbed scanner with a touchscreen tablet attached to it, and a privacy shield. After I vote I get a paper receipt and an “I voted” sticker.

The voting machines look basically like this: http://media.gettyimages.com/photos/new-electronic-voting-machine-is-displayed-for-demonsrtation-purposes-picture-id51670394

Public schools in VA are funded from taxes and lottery profits.

66

So results are in.

Mayor got returned in a land-slide, defeating the union guy, the lefty-green professor, and the playwright/bare-breast advocate.

Four new councillors on a 10 member council; the skate park guy didn’t make it, and the guy who died after ballots were printed pulled 200 votes, but was not elected. New councillor in my ward got about 70% of the vote. One of the new councillors is the son of a councillor who retired from council after four terms.

67

Northeast part of the San Francisco Bay Area. “Fill in the bubble” paper ballots with Sharpies.

My polling place (a church hall) includes three precincts. Someone tells me where my precinct is based on my address; I then sign some sort of ledger next to my name, and am handed a ballot.

68

It occurs to me that one of the reasons Oregon and Washington have gone to mail-in voting has to do with the time zones. Many people had to wait until they got off work to go to the polls. At 5 or 6pm PST, the polls were closing on the east coast and counts were starting to come in: at least a couple of times, the news networks, hot to scoop each other, called the presidential race before voting was finished in the West. This pissed a lot of people off, and they were at one time suggesting some weird jiggery-pokery with delaying the switch to standard time only on the west coast by one week in presidential election years. Ultimately, mail-in voting looks like the ideal solution. And I suspect it is less expensive to administrate.

Aside: there was an episode of Barney Miller where a guy in the witness protection program had been relocated to Billings. He described it as “like Cleveland, with sheep”. Can you verify that?

69

I vote at a fire station that is not too far away, so it is a fairly short walk, although uphill both ways. (We used to vote in the elementary school across the street, but they decided that wasn’t cramped enough.)

An advantage to walking is I can sneak in the back and avoid the campaigners who have staked out the parking lot ambushing persons who have traveled to the site by motor vehicle. The firefighters stand ready with hoses to push back any campaigners who get closer to the polling site than is allowed. Once I saw them hose an interloper with a poor sense of distance with a concentrated blast, followed by them crowding around the unfortunate individual chanting “next time it’s the fire axe!”

As you enter, on the [del]right[/del] other right is a line of tables staffed by three or four individuals, handling various alphabetic groups sorted by last name. By state law, all of these individuals must be at least eighty years old. Each is invested with a big book of name cards. After telling them your name and showing an approved photo ID, they give you your individualized preprinted card to take to the nearby ballot-issuing table. This would be straight-forward, except THE FLOOR IS LAVA!, so you have to carefully balance your way over a series of floor objects. At the ballot-issuing table you give them the card you got three seconds ago and they give you a ballot, to which is affixed a sticker with the ballot number.

You next take the ballot to a cluster of booths to fill out. Again the fact that THE FLOOR IS LAVA increases the difficulty. It would be nice if the fire engines were there, since you could edge along their sides to avoid the lava, but there aren’t any there during the polling hours. I assume that if you have a fire, they politely but firmly inform you that you will just have to wait until the polling station closes, because the fire engines are currently in storage somewhere, and maybe this sort of thing wouldn’t happen if they would let us go back to voting in the elementary school like we used to.

The Republicans recently took over the state legislature, so they removed the option to vote a straight party ticket, on the grounds that too many people were voting for Democrats. And they changed the order of political parties from random to listing first the candidates with the same party affiliation as the governor, who by amazing coincidence is also a Republican. After filling out the ballot, you must then trudge over MORE LAVA to the scanner.

I would like to keep my ballot as a souvenir, and give them a photocopy, but they won’t let you do that. Instead all you get is an “I Voted” sticker, which has a monetary value of 0 (zero) cents. And they aren’t even very careful about giving out the stickers – I’m pretty sure that if I handed in a blank ballot I would still get an “I Voted” sticker. There should also be an “I Pretended to Vote” sticker, but they don’t have those, and I blame this omission on the Republicans.

After leaving the fire house, I walk past the outside campaigners, who are probably thinking “Where did he come from? I don’t remember seeing him get out of a vehicle in the parking area!” Then I walk home, which, as previously noted, it is uphill both ways.

Portions of the above account have employed enhanced reality in order to make things more interesting than they really are.

70

Rural western Pennsylvania. We vote at the sportsman’s club.

When you walk in the door, the oldest women in the town are there with a ledger. I tell them my name, they find me and I sign the ledger. Then I go into a booth with a touchscreen and vote.

The sportsman’s club is a ten minute drive, so I run there and vote before work.

71

Pretty much, though at times it seems they use people who retired during the Hoover years.

72

Same for Oregon. Motor-voter registration and mail-in/drop-off delivery. Compare that to where I lived in Anchorage, where we actually had to hunt for a half hour to even find the polling place, which turned out to be down a potholed alleyway. There was no signage to indicate that it was a polling place, other than a scrawled piece of paper on the door. :mad:

73

I vote at a branch of Ohio University about a mile from my house. They find my name in the book, I sign, and someone takes me to the touch screen machine. I can hear the paper record being made as I confirm my choices.

74

It’s in the middle school gymnasium, the same school I attended. A poll worker crosses your name off the list, and also checks your ID. Voting is done standing at a large voting machine, you close the curtain behind you, and pull the levers.

75

But can you see the paper? A paper trail that you can’t verify doesn’t seem much better than no trail at all.

76

Yep. Paper ballot, pen, sign, mail (or drop off at a ballot box). Mine went into the mail this morning.

77

Oregon. 100% vote by mail. I got my ballot last week and am done. It is the only civilized way.

You get a couple weeks to think about the issues and candidates. Do some research on the issues if you are unsure. You don’t need to leave work on election day. You don’t have to travel anywhere. Get a babysitter if you are encumbered with kids that day. Sick, nasty weather, or other problems that might keep you away from the polling place are non-existent.

And it is cheaper. Our county clerk was encouraging voters to sign up for absentee ballots a couple of years before vote by mail became the method here for everyone.

Voters in other states where you need to show up in person, at a specific place and time, on a particular day, should realize that this is a way to manipulate voter turn out. That is what it is. That is all it is. That is the goal.

Certain hourly and shift workers will not be able to take the time out of their day to vote. Certain poor people without good transportation options will stay home. Mothers and others watching children will not put up with the hassle involved to vote. And many other road blocks to being a knowledgeable voter are removed with vote by mail.

And I am certain that you can clearly see who benefits from all these road blocks to voting.

78

Well, I was in Bozeman, not Billings, but the description I’d give would be “hippies with guns”. And there aren’t all that many sheep (at least, not domesticated ones: There are bighorns in the mountains)-- Montana is more about the cattle. Really, I don’t think Montana can be much like Cleveland, given that the entire state has about half the population of the Cleveland metropolitan area.

79

I’m in Ohio and since I’m one of those elderly ladies that serves as a pollworker on election day, I’ve voted early for the last few years. In fact, this time around, I voted the first day early voting was allowed. We use touch screen voting machines, and some of them can be quite persnickety about being touched in exactly the right spot before they will advance to the next screen. Until June of this year, when we had a special election, we used the ledger book system, with the first person checking the voter’s ID, finding them in the ledger and getting a signature. Then the next person would also check the ID against a separate looseleaf binder and check them off to indicate they had voted. This binder did not require a signature, but it had a total of four copies of each page. The copies would be removed in sets at specified hours and placed on a table so as to be available for viewing by “get-out-the-vote” activists or journalists or just about anyone who was motivated to check. Since our voting location had four different precincts, there was usually a lot of confusion. People had to go to the correct table for their precinct, so there was a lot of pointing to other tables. And if they weren’t at the correct location, we had to try to determine where they needed to go using a different book. But in June we started using electronic tablets and it got easier. First of all, voters no longer had to go to one specific table. If they were in the right location, they could be helped at any table. After checking their ID and finding them in the database, we would have them sign electronically. We would then insert a plastic voting card into a slot in the machine and the card would be encoded to show them the correct ballot when they inserted it into a voting machine. If the voter was not at the correct location, the tablet could quickly and easily look up the correct location and print out a small slip showing the name and address of that location.

As I said, it should make things a lot easier once we get a bit more accustomed to the process. Most of us have at least some familiarity with electronic gadgets by now so only a few (both pollworkers and voters) are intimidated by this newfangled stuff. But the special election was a low turnout event. The real test will come in November when we expect large crowds!

80

Tennessee (Wilson County) - other counties might be different.

On election day, you go to your local voting location based on what district you’re in; it’s usually a school or a church. Stand in line. Present your ID. They look you up, cross you off their list, and hand you a form to sign. You sign it, they put their ID and signature on it, and you get in another line.

You hand another guy your signed paper. He takes it, walks you to an available voting machine, and hands you a paper ballot (about 4" x 11") which you feed into the machine. He explains how the machine works, without touching anything: in each race, you use the touch-screen to select your choice. If the race is on multiple pages, you have to view each page before you can confirm your vote. After you’ve voted in each race, you press the Submit button on the screen which spits out your ballot with your selections printed on it.

Then you take your ballot and go to another line to feed it into the ballot box (like inserting a dollar bill into a vending machine). When the screen confirms that your ballot has been received, you are free to go.

I voted early last week and it was exactly the same except there are fewer polling places; I went to a local community center instead of the nearby school.