In England & Wales (it may be different in Scotland & Northern Ireland…)
Usually placing a X in a box on a slip of paper with a pencil 0.64 cms long, tied to the booth by a scruffy bit of string.
I believe the people staffing the polling stations - there are usually about 3 of them at any one time - may be local authority employees. Certainly the people who count the votes (by hand!) are just volunteers.
Paper ballot, fed into a machine that reads the marks, then swallows the ballot. The paper would only be used again if there was a need for a recount, to fix a machine error or to tally write-ins. (The machine can detect that a write-in candidate was chosen, but has no text recognition facilities, so can’t read the actual name.)
Poll workers are chosen by the clerk, with equal numbers from Democratic & Republican parties. Other parties and independents are deliberately ignored. They are paid a modest but adequate hourly wage and are given lunch, dinner and copius quantities of snacks.
Absentee ballots are available up until 5PM the day prior to the election. You do not have to have it mailed to you; you can go into the clerk’s office anytime after the ballots are printed (a few weeks before each election), request an absentee ballot and fill it out on the spot. These are kept sealed until after the polls close when they are hand-counted. This can delay getting the results posted, since many people around here vote by absentee.
A side anecdote or two. In my rural, lightly-populated area, it is not uncommon for an election to be won by one or two votes. Not long ago, one candidate had 154 votes, his opponent, 149. His opponent demanded a recount, and they came out exactly the same. The settled it by tossing a coin.
The ballot software our county uses considers write-ins a nuisance and lumps all names together for the official posting. A clerk has to void the computer’s results, separate the names and declare the winner. This happens more than you might think.
In one recent local election, a local farmer decided, on the Sunday before the Tuesday election, that none of the candidates on the ballot weren’t to his liking. He began to make phone calls to his friends, and on Tuesday, the write-ins for him as Town Chairman won over all the official, printed candidates.
But the computer refused to recognize his victory.
California sent out “vote by mail” applications, so they may be trying to phase this in, too. Makes sense. My precinct has been touch screens for the last few elections.
What I always wonder about is why I have to walk past another polling place to get to the one I’m usually assigned to, and why I’m occasionally assigned to the closer one. They must rearrange the polling precincts each election.
No, no, voting is compulsory.
To make it short, all voters are divided in groups of 200 called “Grupo de Votación” (Polling group). The 3 guys manning the polling group only count the votes of these 200. We rarely get more than 2 different votes. In a presidential/congress election they would count 200 prez votes, 200 congress votes and then tally the preferential votes.
There are about 65000 such groups in Peru.
The method varies by county in the SoW. Here in Pierce County we use the same basic system as that described by DesertDog (connect segments of an arrow); in King County just to the north, they used punchcards for a long time, and may still do so.
At the polling place I go to, there’s also a lonely touchscreen voting machine (the kind that displays a printed recap behind glass for verification before the vote is recorded). I’ve tried it a couple of times, but it’s just not as . . . involving as marking the ballot — which, in turn is vastly less satisfying than the click-click-click-click-kaCHUNK of the old lever-style machines.
(All of which is somewhat moot, since I live in the last county in the SoW that has not [yet] succumbed to exclusive vote-by-mail. I fully expect that this will be the last Presidential election that will see me in a polling place.)
As for poll workers, they seem to be drawn from the ranks of the retired. For some, it appears to be the high point of their year.
I haven’t been to a polling station in ages.
I vote via permanent absentee ballot. Mail, baby. Mail.
Was that in Hawaii? Perhaps they decided to be laid back about it, but when I was there, the regulations allowed only two officials of different parties to enter the booth with her. Your grandfather would not have been permitted to enter. I mean, that sounds sweet and everything, but how does anyone know he did not just mark the ballot the way he wanted? And if she was completely senile, isn’t that what he would have done?
To add to what dtilque said, in Oregon the voter draws a line completing the arrow pointing to the candidate or vote he or she is casting.
Here in Minnesota, the law permits a disabled person to have their own personal attendant or family member to assist them when voting, or they can get help from the poll workers. If using the poll workers, they get 1 from each party.
A blind friend of mine was glad when we replaced this with the Automark machines, where they use a screen and headphone voice prompts to print out a marked ballot, which they then feed thru the optical scanner. Previously, her sister always helped her to vote, and they often disagreed about candidates. She’d get comments like “you really want to vote for that corrupt guy?”. I guess family members can get away with that – poll workers have to be much more neutral!
I don’t approve of allowing family members or other non-neutral parties in to assist. Nothing against the examples of personal relatives that have been given so far, I’m sure they’re all fine, upstanding people who would never abuse the privilege, but you can see the potential for trouble.
No, a small township in rural Northeastern Pennsylvania. And I don’t doubt that he just pulled the lever for who he was going to vote for. This same township kept sending his sister absentee ballots for over two years after she died.
I’m not sure what our law in Michigan is, but I’ve never had a problem with my not-eligible-to-vote wife accompanying me, neither to the booth with machine (previous precinct) or to the almost-booth where we mark the paper ballot with the little pencil (current precinct). Quid pro quo; she lets me study the Mexican system when I take her there to vote. (She was incredulous when she learnt that (until recently) I only had to give my name and address to vote.)
I am sure that you have never had a problem with it yourself, but I would hope that most people would understand why it’s just good policy not to allow it. If they allow it for you, then they have to allow it for the skank who WILL vote his own choices while assuring his blind aunt that her wishes are being carried out.
I see you point, but I wonder how important it is statistically? We don’t usually have elections that are so close, and when they are, it doesn’t really matter who wins by whatever tight margin. I don’t subscribe to “each vote must count” because statistically, it doesn’t matter. And if the margin really is that tight, then the will of the people is such that either candidate – right or wrong – satisfies the general will of the people.
I don’t think that’s relevant. I believe that each person’s vote should be assured whether it “matters” or not. And I don’t want to see a single person stick in two votes. Just not cricket.
In England we use a simple X against the candidates name (different in Scotland, N Ireland, and - I think - Wales, where they have proportional representation for the parliament/ assemblies). It’s worked well but over the last few years the Labour Government has made postal and proxy voting much easier (you used to need to demonstrate a need to be away from home) in a desperate attempt to get a higher turn-out. Unfortunately they haven’t changed the way voters have been registered with the result the electoral fraud is shooting up and undermining confidence in the whole system.
Only last week we had a report from the Council of Europe saying fraud was childishly simple.
That depends on what county you are in. The county elections office make up the ballots and each can make them however they want. Here in Washington County, for example, the voter fills in an oval with a pen so that an optical scanner can count them.
We used to have punch card ballots in this county (one of three in Oregon that had them). They even sent them out in vote-by-mail elections. They were somewhat less than user-friendly, to say the least. One of the few fortunate results of the 2000 Florida election debacle was that this state got rid of punch card ballots for all elections.
BTW, I was quite aware of the danger of hanging chads (and the word chad) before aforesaid debacle brought them to the national attention. This was the result of having learned to program computers in the days of keypunches. Admittedly, they were rare with keypunches (unlike with the card ballots), but they did occasionally happen.
In Finland, everyone over 18 is eligible to vote. When elections are approaching, you get a card mailed to you which has your identification (name, address, SS number) and details on the voting location in your precinct. This voting location should be used if you are going to vote on the actual election day; however, if you’re voting beforehand, you can go to any location. There’s a period of time, about 3-4 days about a week before the actual election, when you can go cast your vote beforehand in case you are not able to do it on the actual election day.
On election day, you go to the voting location with the card that was mailed to you, stand in line and report to an official with a list of names for that location. They check your ID to see that you are actually you, then give you a folded ballot which has a blank circle inside. You go into the booth and write the number of your candidate inside the circle with the pen provided. Then you come out with your folded-up ballot and go to the next official, who checks your ID again, stamps your ballot and watches you slide your ballot into a locked box.
If you vote beforehand, the process is the same, but your ballot and voter card are placed in an envelope and sealed. These votes are then stored until election day, when they are opened and counted along with the others.
The people manning the poll stations are volunteers. I’m not entirely sure about the selection process for them.
Then I guess old, blind granny ought to pick her helpers better. I don’t understand why the government (or the parties) ought to prevent someone from exercising her judgment in order to let her exercise her judgment. I might argue that old, blind granny has the right to use whatever assistance suits her, and if she makes a bad decision, then it’s just too bad. That’s not to say that the state/parties shouldn’t offer help in the manner described if old, blind granny should request it, but to force it upon her violates her human rights, which is much more severe that whether a statistically inconsequential vote is changed.
I would like to take this opportunity to suggest everyone watch a DVD called Hacking Democracy, about a woman who decided to investigate how secure and accurate computerized voting machines are. What got her back up was one election in Florida where a candidate got a negative vote total.
Although there’s a lot of paranoia, misinformation and propaganda in this field, she was able to prove that a voting machine could be compromised by anyone with a PC and a minimum of computer knowledge.
She also points out the risks associated with the manufacturers of voting machines, how they accept contributions from some political parties and refuse to reveal their source code. When she got some by accident, it appeared to have no built-in security features at all, and they weren’t tested anyway.
Personally, I think the source code for all voting machines should be open source only. There’s no other way to assure that it works fairly and is secure.