As I understand it, there are actually multiple elections occuring in America in November, not just the one for the President. I caught sight of a picture of a ballot paper somewhere with some blurb underneath - and cannot find it again - and it seemed to me that there were multiple ballots on the same sheet. Is this correct? If so, why do it like that? Here in the U.K., ballots were seperate - but then we use paper marked with crosses.
It would be difficult to have a separate ballot for every elected position and issue, because there are a lot of them.
In this election, everyone will be voting for presidential electors, everyone will be voting for US Representatives for their district, everyone will be voting for some manner of state legislators, people in roughly 2/3 of the states will be voting for US Senators, people in most states will be voting for governors, and people everywhere will be voting for mayors, supervisors, comptrollers, municipal and county legislators and executives of all sorts, local judges, school boards, bond issues, and other referenda of all conceiveable types.
Yup. There’ll be dozens on my ballot. See:
http://66.107.4.19/voter_ballot_layout.asp?wd=33&pct=24&con=5%20&leg=6%20&rep=11&jud=6%20&cnt=8%20&bor=2&par=DEM
(And Illinois doesn’t elect state officials this year. That’ll be in 2006)
Nitpick - governors won’t be on the ballot in “most states”. There’s only 11 governor’s races in this election, only a few of which are likely to be very hotly contested.
The ballot does have many items on it. I just mailed in an absentee ballot and it had about 30 different seperate people and issues to vote on. Here’s a pdf file of my sample ballot.
…so John Kerry is running for President and Jerry Kohn is running for Senate? That’s great!
I think I’m starting to understand some of the European confusion about our election–I can’t believe that anyone thought that we only voted for one office or issue at a time! If only it was that easy!
I mean, when do y’all vote for judges, city councilors, referenda, etc? It’s so expensive to run an election, after all.
The NYC ballot will vary from assembly district to assembly district but the list of candidates is nineteen pages long. My county, the Bronx, fills up pages 5-7. We also have our state Legislature (Assembly and Senate) to vote for, county judges, etc. Each candidate can also run on the line of whatever party they can get an endorsement from–you’ll notice Kerry is running on the Working Families and Nader on the Peace and Justice Ticket too.
So, our voters will enter our 1962-era Shoup Big Gray Machines o’ Freedom and be confronted with dozens of names, organized by office, from the most prominent to the most obscure, in long lines across three feet of machine in smallish type, with referendums in weird legalese at the very bottom. We have to post giant copies of what’s in the machine on the walls so people can study it when they’re in the booth.
I can see why other countries are confused if their ballots are so simple.
I don’t believe Europeans vote for judges. Nor sheriffs or coroners. And if you think about it, voting for these kinds of positions is probably not the best way to fill them.
And ballot measures (initiatives and referenda) are fairly rare in Europe too. Although I believe some countries did have referenda about joining the EC and/or adopting the euro. But those were probably exceptional cases.
Okay,so why one piece of paper? Why not one per election?
Wuh? Did you read any of the replies? You expect me to deal with three dozen some-odd separate pieces of paper when I go to the poll?
In most states (other than for absentee ballots which must be mailed and counted by hand), people do not vote by marking a piece of paper but by using some kind of mechanical or electronic voting device.
One type of voting machine which was developed in the 1950’s and is still in use in many places looks like this.
The voter pulls the big handle to close the privacy curtain, then flips a lever under the name of each candidate he is voting for. Mechanical interlocks prevent voting for more than one candidate for each office. When the handle is pulled to open the curtain, the votes are registered inside the machine on a device similar to a car’s odometer for each candidate.
Another type of ballot device, probably the most commonly used, is shown here. The voter is given a card like the computer keypunch cards used for many years with each position on the card pre-perforated for easy punching. The card is inserted at the top of the device and secured by pre-punched holes over the two red pins shown. The ballot consists of several pages, each corresponding to a row of holes on the card. A stylus is used to punch the holes for the selected candidates on that page, then the page is turned exposing a new batch of candidates and a new row of holes. After the voter is finished he replaces the card in a sleeve provided for it and then drops the card in the ballot box on his way out. This was the source of controversy in the Florida election of 2000 with “hanging chads” (holes that were punched, but the waste did not completely separate from the card, causing errors in the counting machine) and “dimpled chads”, where the stylus had left an impression on the card, but the hole was not punched out.
Some areas are now changing to PC based voting, using a touch screen monitor. This has led to controversy because there is generally no paper receipt to verify against in case a recount is needed, and because there are not sufficient controls and audits to guard against hackers and/or unscrupulous software providers rigging an election.
Because if you hand every voter over a dozen (and in some places, closer to three or four dozen) pieces of paper, a few are probably not going to make it to the voter in the first place, a few might get lost on the way into the ballot box, a few will get misplaced during sorting, a few will get misplaced during counting, etc.
Plus, you’d have the printing costs.
I don’t see why people have problems with multiple bits of paper - we don’t. But then we have paper ballots. Having looked at that monstrosity of a voting machine, I’m not surprised some voters get confused!
As ever KISS applies.
Actually the voting machines are suprisingly easy to use IMHO. I don’t remember hearing of significant problems involving them from the 2000 election.
I have never used the type of set-up in the second link in Fat Bald Guy’s post, the kind that caused much of the problems in Florida in 2000.
The mechanical lever machines dated from the very late nineteenth century, and did not present many usage problems. Imposing as they looked, they were very simple to understand. They were intended to speed counting, and also to make fraud less likely, paper ballot tampering having been a part of the nineteenth century political landscape. They were phased out mostly because of the cost - upkeep, storage, etc, and the lack of an audit trail. They were particularly easy to use if one wished to vote a “straight ticket” - you could generally pull a single lever to vote for all the Democratic or Republican candidates at once. The punch card systems currently in use, at least the ones I’ve used, do not seem to be set up with “straight ticket” provisions - probably all for the better.
Some background:
One-third. Barring special elections, no more than 1/3 of the Senate is up for election in any given year. US Constitution, Article I, Section 3:
“They” being the Senators.
To piggy-back a question or three, how was it decided which Senators went into which class? When new states were admitted, how was it decided which of their Senators went into which class? And way back in IIRC 1992 when both California Senate seats were being contested, how was it decided which candidates were vying for which seat?
Quite simple.
One of the elections was to complete the term of Pete Wilson, who had been elected Governor in 1990, and who had appointed an interum successor, John Seymour. The next election there would be in 1994.
The other was for a full, six-year term, for the seat that had been held for the previous 24 years by Alan Cranston.
The Short Term and Full Term elections were held concurent with one another, with candidates filing for whichever of the two races they wished.
Two-thirds of the states, though only one third of the senators. Each state has two senators, who are not in the same “class,” and so elects a senator in two-thirds of even-numbered years. I.e., the seats up for grabs this year are the ones elected in 1998; in 2006, those elected in 2000 will be open, and so on. Using examples completely pulled from my behind here, North Dakota may elect in 1996/2002/2008 and 1998/2004, sitting out 2000/2006, while Nebraska gets 2000/2006 and 2002/2008, sitting out 1998/2004. Mississippi, meanwhile, goes 1998/2004 and 2000/2006, sitting out 2002/2008. (Any correlation to what those three states actually have for senatorial terms is purely coincidental; I randomly picked three states to illustrate how the three classes mean votes in 2/3 of even years.)
I believe (no cite, sorry) they drew lots at the first sitting of the Senate in the First Congress to decide who would fall into which class. As far as new admissions go, I believe there are two criteria: (1) one or both seats is awarded to bring the classes up to equality with each other. Thus with 100 senators, 34 belong to one class and 33 to the other two. The 51st state would have senators in the two classes now with 33. (2) Subject to the first criterion, effort is made to give the senator-to-be-elected as long a term as possible, so that a state admitted on July 4, year X, and electing two senators for the first time that November, will if possible (based on keeping even numbers in the three classes first) have one senator whose term expires in year X+6, and if the classes were even before admission, the other senator will have a four-year term expiring in year X+4.
I don’t know what California did, but customarily when a vacancy exists due to death or resignation along with another owing to term expiration, there are separate “offices” on the ballot for the full-term office and the completion-of-term office. In other words, if Smith’s term ends this year and he’s running for re-election, and Brown has replaced Jones, who was elected in 2002 and died unexpectedly in 2003, there will be races for “Senator to fill the vacancy caused by the expiration of Sen. Smith’s term (six-year term)” (for which Smith and Johnson are running) and “Senator to complete the term of the late Sen. Jones (four-year term)” (for which Brown and Havlicek are running).
But states have two senators, so friedo’s statement is correct - in about 2/3 of the states, one of the senators will be up for election.
Where I live, they use butterfly ballots with punch cards. The very first option is to vote straight ticket.
And those butterfly ballots are a pain in the ass. Some years back I worked as an election inspector here. I remember a number of cases where the ballot had to be tossed out because the person inserted the card backwards. And many cases of hanging chad, dimpled chad, etc. The rules here then was that if the chad was hanging from 1 or 2 corners, the election inspectors had to remove it. If just once corner was broken, the ballot had to be redone by the inspectors to make sure that vote wouldn’t be counted on the theory the machines that process the cards would knock the chad off and count that vote. And with absentee ballots, this card system is even worse. I voted absentee already. The card is attached to styrofoam. The voter has to find the right number on the card for the candidate he wants to vote for, and then carefully punch out that hole. Punch the wrong hole and don’t notice it, and you voted for someone you didn’t want to. If you punch the wrong hole and do notice it, and you are voting absentee by mail, and you have to contact the township clerk to mail out a new ballot. Hopefully it gets to you in time, and you can mail it back so it will be received by Nov. 2. Otherwise, one slip can mean you won’t be able to vote. 