How many forms for November election?

Factual Questions
21

Here’s what is on my ballot:
http://pollfinder.sos.state.mn.us/ShowCandidateList.asp?CountyId=28&PrecinctId=0075&PrecinctNm=LA%20CRESCENT%20P-2

Round here we have the fill in the bubble like standardized tests.

there is also mayor and some other city posts.

nearby Caledonia has 3 empty offices (mayer and 2 city council) and noone filed in time so they face an empty ballot. This has got statewide attention (but people found out that there is residency requirements)

I know one of the people running for soil and water supervisor district 3 so that vote will be easy.

Brian

22

Kerry is running on the “Democratic-Farmer-Labor” ticket???

23

For or against?

24

Yes, that is the Minnesota version of the Democratic party.

It was formed in 1948 by the merger of the Democratic Party and the Farmer-Labor Party. Partly due to concerns about counting votes for President. In 1944, when FDR was the nominee of both parties, there was concern that because the votes were split between 2 parties, the Republican candidate might be declared the winner of Minnesota’s presidential votes.

Regarding the voting method, we also use those paper ballots where you fill in the little circle just like on school tests. They work real well.

It’s cheap & quick to use – all it takes to complete it is a pen. Much cheaper than any of the touch screen machines. And no waiting in line for an open machine.

It continues to work even if the electricity goes off. We’ve had people filling their ballots out by candlelight when electricity failed at one polling place.

When done voting, you feed your ballot thru an optical scanner that checks it. If you’ve made some mistake, like voting twice for the same office, it spits the ballot back out at you and you can do it over. No Florida-type spoiled ballots!

There is a paper trail that is not only complete, it’s also very easy to recount. They just feed all the ballots thru the machine again, and check the count. Our city clerk now routinely double and triple counts the ballots if it is at all close. (Many of the fancy new touch screen machines print a ‘ballot receipt’ that serves as a paper trail. But those would be very difficult, slow, & expensive to recount. It would have to be done manually, and that is very slow & error prone. In reality, it would hardly ever be possible to do a recount on one of these machines.)

For blind, visually impaired, or illiterate voters, we have a computerised machine that will read the ballot to them. They pick out their choices via keyboard, touch screen, mouse, etc. When done, the machine prints out a paper ballot with the appropriate bubbles filled in. This looks just like everybody else’s ballot, and they just feed it thru the same optical scanner as all the other ballots. No separate count for the blind voters in a precinct (so no chance of that being forgotten, and no loss of privacy for those voters.)

These paper/optical scan ballot systems are so much better than all the others that I’ve seen, I can’t see why anyone would prefer one of the other systems. Unless you’re selling one of the other systes, and are looking toward making lots of money from that!

25

New Scientist, the British science magazine evidently knows its audience, because it went after this exact question in the Oct. 16, 2004 issue.

An excerpt:

26

Some states eg New Jersey have their elections for state offices in odd-numbered years. Also only 1/3 of states will vote for Senator.

27

If you had read the rest of the thread you would have seen that this had already been corrected several times. One third of the Senate will be elected this year. That’s 33 Senators, all from different states. Meaning two thirds of the states will be holding Senatorial elections.

28

We use these paper/optical scan ballot systems described by t-bonham@scc.net in our civic elections, which are the closest to the US model, with multiple offices being voted for on the same ballot (Provincial and Federal are one MP/MPP per ballot). They work very well, with all the advantages noted above.

IMHO what the US really needs is a federal voting system that is actually run by a non-partisan agency in a consistent manner for all voters, instead of leaving the voters to the mercy of whatever gimcrack registration and voting system their individual state (or county!) comes up with.

29

34 Senators this year, actually.

30

But since the states run elections the federal government is out of the loop. State’s rights advocates would likely scream bloody blue murder if the US federal government tried to move into that area of responsibility.

I’d like to know what the reaction would be if the feds simply acted as the chair of a nation wide initiative to establish election criteria that the states would then incorporate themselves.

31

No, I’d hate to have the Federal government in charge of this.

What our country really needs is a system like Minnesota & a few other states have now: registration at the polls on election day.

That would have completely avoided the 2000 Florida voting hassle.

And most of the frauds/attempted frauds you have been hearing about are related to people destroying/delaying/rejecting voter registrations. That only matters because those states have a deadline for registering to vote, and if you miss it you can’t vote. If you can register at the polls on election day, all those ‘vote suppression’ tricks are meaningless. The person whose registration you destroyed will show up at the polls to vote, and just has to register then, before voting. (Takes a bit longer, that’s all.) In Minnesota, all you need is a Drivers License or other ID with an address in that precinct, or a copy of a utility bill with an address in the precinct, or a neighbor who is registered in the precinct who can vouch that you live in the precinct.

There have been lots of suggestions to pass laws requiring various additional steps, like requiring giving voter registration drives to give a receipt to each person registered, etc. These seem to me like just more hoops to make people jump through. Treat the disease, not the symptom – allow registration at the polls on election day nationwide! Then most of these tricks don’t matter!

32

It isn’t mandatory to register in advance in order to vote in Canada (although it speeds things up at the polling station if you do so). Elections Canada used to send out people to update the voter lists before each election, but have changed to a new system for the last few years. You can register yourself or update your existing voter registration by simply ticking off a box on your income tax form which authorizes the Canada Revenue Agency to pass your name and current address to Elections Canada.

To fit the US model this would probably have to be done on your state income tax forms (I don’t know if there are any states that don’t have income tax?) but I don’t see any insurmountable problems.

“But,” you say, “how does this register me as a Republican or Democrat so I can vote in the primaries? I sure don’t want a party affiliation on my income tax form.” Well, why in hell do you let the government operate your political party’s candidate selection process in the first place? This is one of the things I find so bemusing about the US elections.

33

What party affiliation on my income tax form? They take my money regardless of which party (if any) I’m a member of.

NH has registration prior to the election, with a closing date, but if you “miss” that date, you can register the day of the election, though I’m not sure about a neighbor that can “vouch” for you being valid. Seems to me that “vouching” have plenty of potential to introduce fraud.

=Butler

34

Here in Minnesota, there is no such ‘registration’ as Republican or Democrat – you just register to vote. Then on Primary Election day, at the polls I get a ballot, and choose to vote in the column for either Republican, Democrat, or one of the other parties. Then I feed it into the machine to be counted, completely privately. Nobody knows which party I voted for; it is a secret ballot.