vote that is. Up here in the frozen north we don’t have to worry about chadss at all. We do things the old fashioned way. When we say we put an X on the ballot we really do.
You walk into the polling station and identify yourself to the Poll clerk. They look for your name on the voters list and they cross it off. If you are unknown to them they will ask you for their ID. They rip a ballot out of a numbered ballot book and hand it to you. You go to a booth, which in my case was a cardboard shield where you unflold your ballot. The candidates names are written onthe ballot with their party affiliations written underneath it. A big circle appears on the ballot where you are supposed to mark your vote. You fold the ballot up leaving the end with the check stub exposed. You hand it back to the clerk who removes the check stub and saves it. The ballot is then handed back to you and they remove the covering on the box and you put the ballot into the box. Our ballot boxes are cardboard.
After the election is over the poll clerk and their assistant open the ballot box in the presence of any scrutineers. The Clerk opens the ballot and announces the vote. It is shown to all people present who have to agree if the vote is valid or spoiled. Some ways votes are spoiled are if no name is checked, if more than one name is checkedor if someone writes in a vote. The deputy poll clerk writes the vote on a tally sheet. After you record the votes you do it a second time to make sure the count is accurate.
Sounds like a nice method, which might work in smaller US voting precincts, such as the town where I grew up, but doesn’t sound all that feasible in lots of precincts, such as where I vote now.
It would still not solve all of the problems they had in Florida. Those people can’t even figure out that an arrow by the candidate’s name indicates a good location to vote and instead pick an arrow by another candidate’s name.
There are just some people who will need voting lessons.
Odieman. Congrats on using an old system that effectively works. I’d be in support of something like that here, and barring media interference, wouldn’t be hard to pull off.
Suggestion for next US election:
Do everything that Odieman said. But, get rid of exit polling. The news agencies come up with something else to talk about every other day of the year. They can sure as hell come up with something else to talk about on that day. Leave the counters alone and just ensure that they have their numbers in by the deadline. At that point, instead of speculation, you can actually call out who our elected officials are without contest.
