I voted “below the line” in the last two senate elections in Australia. Only one ballot sheet for that – about 2’6" from memory, took me something like 20+ minutes, and very easy to spoil. Fortunately for the count, not many of us did that, and those were mostly only counted after the result had been decided (they do an exhaustive count for the records, but they start by just counting enough to get a result)
nevvvver mind
This is another weird thing for Europeans. How can you allow the hoi polloi to vote for judges? As far as I know, in some countries (Italy and France, partly in Germany, as well) judges are being chosen by their peers (or bodies of judges, elected by and within the judiciary).
At the very least this tends to ensure that judges are highly qualified and don’t hold extreme political views.
It’s seriously weird to allow the general public to vote for judges, and even worse to allow politicians to appoint judges, as we’ve seen with US Supreme Court appointments.
In the UK and most Commonwealth countries, appointments are made by a Judicial Appointments Commission or similar, according to guidelines set out in the Cape Town Principles.
I live in an urban suburb. In South Africa, Election Day is a public holiday. I come to the polling station (in my case, a school), I stand in the queue for 5 minutes tops (usually only 1-2), as the queue moves close to the actual polling station in the hall, someone comes down it and scans my ID barcode to check I’m registered, then I get to the head of the queue and am directed to one of 3 or 4 tables, based on my surname. Someone takes my ID, checks me against the printout list of registered voters for that station, gives me the ballot(s) and my ID, crosses me off the list, and marks my thumbnail with indelible ink. I then go to one of the open voting booths, pick up the pencil there and make my checks, fold my ballot(s) and stick them in the appropriate colour-coded box under the eye of an election monitor (there are also monitors watching the queue and the polling station hall). Then I walk out.
We do have a period of several months before the vote where on certain weekends, everyone can check their registration. You’re registered to vote at a particular voting station closest to your residential address. This has never been an issue for me, as I’ve lived in one place for many decades, but I still check every election. If you’re unable to be at your registered place, on voting day, I think there’s a few more hoops to jump through to vote elsewhere, but not too much, as it’s all linked to your barcoded ID. Probably only adds a couple minutes to your time as there’s one table dedicated to those people.
In certain places - some of the more rundown municipalities, and often rural places - there are hours-long queues, though. So not everywhere in South Africa is like my suburb. And the very first democratic election, in 1994, was a bit less well-organized. But that year the queues were like parties.
I have a good understanding of the US system and find it archaic, overly complex, and in many ways very confusing for the US voter. I find it especially bizarre that a citizen might be allowed to vote in one state, but moving to a new state might legally prevent or restrict their vote. In Canada, any citizen 18 or older has the right to vote, with only 3 exceptions - the Chief Electoral Officer and their Deputy, who are responsible for running elections, and are forbidden by law from voting, and the Governor-General, our head of state, who does not vote by long-standing convention.
As a Canadian in Ontario, my federal and provincial election choices are simple - the ballot may have many candidates, from all major parties and numerous minor parties and independents, but I only need to mark one choice. Most Canadians tick the box on their income tax form to have their name and address automatically forwarded to the federal and provincial election commissions to update the voting lists. I’ve rarely had to wait more than a minute or two in line even at popular voting times, and then mostly because I go with my wife who is in a wheelchair and takes longer to vote.
Municipal elections are more complex. In the last my ballot included the mayor, my ward councillor, and the school trustee for my zone (and there were 4 different ballots, depending on which of the different school boards you were registered for (Public or Separate school systems, and English or French within each system - our own historically bizarre system). To vote you filled in the oval for your choices, put the ballot back in the secrecy sleeve, and handed it to the election officer, who stuck it in a scanner which extracted the ballot, scanned and recorded the votes, and dumped the ballot into a locked container. If there was an error on your ballot, the scanner rejected it, it was recorded as spoiled, and you got a replacement to fill out correctly. Vote counting was ongoing and totals quickly available when the polls closed, and the original paper ballot was available for any rare need for a recount.
I am a resident in Switzerland, but not a citizen, so I cannot vote. Most voting is done by mail, but people have the option to go to their local polling station on Saturday and Sunday, according to Wikipedia. On Sunday the polls close at noon and the results are known within 2 or 3 hours. For my community of 8000 people, there is one polling station, at the community building (Gemeinde / Gemeindehaus) and it is open for 30 minutes on Sunday morning. Even then, the voter has to have the voting supplies.
And I just learned that the German word Urne means ballot box.
My coworkers? They think the US elections is being run by kindergartners. I even got a meme about how slow the votes are being counted in Nevada from a coworker in China. They are amused.
My boss refuses to travel to the U.S. while Trump is president. He’d like to visit the SW and Texas, but he has to wait.
And I just learned that “urn”, which I used in my post above, doesn’t mean ballot box 
. Sorry for that, and thanks for setting me straight.
This is exactly how we vote in my precinct in the U.S.
I work for a political party in South Africa and have been directly involved in election day operations for several elections. (And I agree with everything that MrDibble said about South African elections.) My thoughts in response to the OP’s question:
The absence of an independent agency to run elections is crazy. I understand constitutionally the states run the elections, so maybe a federal agency is out of the question. But you’d think each state could set up an independent agency with uniform procedures across the state - leaving it to be run by elected state and local officials just seems weird.
The speed of the counting doesn’t actually seem too bad to me. Here, we hold elections on Wednesdays and usually have final results only on Saturday - and that’s with very simple ballots with only one choice to make. Given the complexity of the ballots and all the complications around mail-in and provisional ballots, four days to get to a result doesn’t seem too bad.
That being said, if it weren’t for the Electoral College and the winner-take-all system, the election could have been called for Biden days ago. The whole Electoral College system seems shockingly undemocratic - not so much the different weighting for different states, though that is silly - but the fact that a candidate who wins a state with 50.1% of the vote gets 100% of the Electoral College votes. Why not assign them proportionally?
Also crazy is the sheer length of the election cycle, and the quantity of money sunk in to it. As someone who makes his money from politics, I’m envious of my American counterparts; as an ordinary citizen, I’m horrified for you all.
It doesn’t seem like all the craziness is the Republicans’ fault - a lot of the craziness seems to be baked into the system. But certainly the Republicans seem to be trying to make shit more crazy in all sorts of terrible ways.
Each state legislature gets to decide on its own how to allocate the state’s electoral votes. Two states—Maine and Nebraska—award their electoral votes by which candidates win majorities in their congressional districts (like parliamentary constituencies). So, on the maps you’ll see that those two states split their votes.
That is simply not true.
Winner takes all has three advantages
- It’s simple
- It tends to produce clear results
- It’s quick
You can make a call with FPTP winner takes all within an hour of polls closing
Patently you can’t assign EC votes proportionally until you count all the votes. Plus there is the unresolved question of what do with the votes not cast for Biden or Trump.
Biden looks like he could win by 100 EC votes under WTA
I did a quick exercise allocating the EC votes proportionally and the margin was single figures
It’s actually at the precinct level. Because I live in a highly populated area, my precinct is the block I live on & the next two blocks over. If you cross 3 streets in any direction, you’re in a different precinct. (And depending on the direction, you might have crossed through a precinct). Theoretically, each precinct could have a different ballot (if people run for precinct chair). If you go a mile in any direction, you’re in some other district for something that we vote on.
To be fair, that wasn’t feasible until recently when we could do “ballots on demand” reliably. As I mentioned above, with the way things are carved up people who live across the street from each other can be in different precincts, which could mean different congressional districts, or the same county-but different cities, or the same city but different counties, or______. It was almost necessary to say that people had to go to their correct polling place so they could get a (pre-printed) ballot that only had questions they were supposed to vote on.
I would have to disagree with this based on the evidence of Pennsylvania, Georgia, Arizona, Nevada…
You can’t officially assign the EC votes until all the votes have been counted, but that’s strictly speaking true under FPTP as well. When it comes to making a call though - under a proportional system you could have confidently called PA’s votes being split 10-10 a long time ago, regardless of which candidate ends up slightly ahead.
There are systems for calculating proportional assignments, e.g. Largest Remainder or D’Hondt.
Given that the popular vote is looking like 51% to 48%, a margin in the single figures or low teens would be proportionally accurate.
What I am curious to see now is what the media is going to do.
They relentlessly pounded the man to turn him into this unfathomable monster and now that he is(will) be gone soon it will be interesting to see if the media will continue with its hatred narrative against someone else.
The media fed themselves of this hatred and I find it hard to believe that they are going to relinquish this source of power.
I find it particularly interesting that Mark Zuckerberg contributed $400 million to the cost of actually running the election, because the states and federal government couldn’t meet the cost.
Unbelievable.
There’s an element of heart-warming that he would donate this amount towards a civic cause - till you think about what power this level of concentration of wealth gives those in his position.
Ooohhh, which media was that? I gave up on the media long ago, so it would be nice to know which media was actually appropriately critical rather than going after him with kid gloves.
I’ve spent a lot of time over the past few days at work, explaining to my Aussie-native coworkers What’s Going On.
If I never say “it varies by state” again, it’ll be too soon.
I tell you one thing - it’s a good thing the President doesn’t have any ability whatsoever to affect the election results otherwise the US would have formally moved to becoming a dictatorship this week.
Trump made himself an easy target. Most of the time the media just recording of what he said.