Well, I know that around here, there are MANY voting places that will be open on election day that are not open for early voting. Like, schools, that can’t be opened for early voting.
I can guarantee you there will be a line outside my polling place by 630 tomorrow morning. Our polling place usually has the highest turnout in the city, but usually only have 8 - 10 voting booths for the thousands designated to that office.
During the last presidential election I stood in line for almost 2 hours. Here in Minnesota you can register to vote right there at the polling place and that can add time if the initial “check in” people do not divert them off to the registration desk.
California does have early voting. It varies by county where the early voting stations are. This article says that Orange County has tons of early voting stations where LA you had to got to the registrar of voters.
Imagine that. Who’s in charge of voting in California? Is he a Republican?
In California, as in most states, county registrars/supervisors get to decide how many polling stations to set up and where they should be.
It’s not that the State is effing LA County - LA County itself is effing LA County, while Orange County is providing better facilities of its own accord.
In addition to what RNATB said, California’s state government is very Democratic. Virtually all statewide offices, with the prominent exception of the governor, are held by Democrats. That includes the Secretary of State, who is in charge of elections.
Ed
Then it’s just stupidity rather than partisan bias that keeps the largest population city in the country from having more than one early voting site. That’s not snark, just the realization that not everything can be ascribed to Republican malice, I suppose.
Not in the city of Chicago, but in the suburbs, there were 44 early-voting locations and 1,310 election-day polling places.
Why weren’t there more places to vote early?
No one predicted that what had been a little-used convenience in previous elections would become a major factor this time around.
Thanks for fighting that bit of ignorance. I guess we do have early voting at one location in the city and 3 in the county. I had just never heard of it.
I’m also paranoid about possible voting fraud on any web based voting system. i would think that there would be a way to attach a random serial number to every absentee ballot in order to allow the voter to double check the results of their individual vote. Even the notoriously feeble DMV has managed to allow quite a few transactions to be conducted over the internet. I voted by absentee ballot a week ago and I sure as hell hope my vote got there without any problem.
I went to early vote during my lunch break last week and found that the wait was 1 hour 45 minutes. Since that wouldn’t fit in to my lunch hour, I went back after work and ended up standing in line for 2 hrs, 10 minutes.
I asked the election official if I should just come back on election day instead and he said that the election officials were told to expect lines on election day of four hours or more.
For the non-US voters, I’d be curious to know how many items you might typically be voting on. In a busy election, a ballot in the US might include federal elections (President, Senate, H.Reps), state elections (governor, attorney general, state senate, state house, judges), local elections (mayor/city council/county commissioners, clerk of the court, prosecuting attorney, treasurer), bond issues (for capital investments), state constitutional amendments, and propositions of law.
The lesser races generally get little publicity (unless there is a hot social issue somewhere), so a long ballot can lead to cumulative delays as people puzzle over various elections and questions that they’re encountering for the first time.
This is the major point. And the reason it became a major factor is that the Obama campaign made an extremely strong effort to push early voting, for several reasons. Mainly, the more of their voters they got to vote early, the less of them they had to make sure to get to the polls on election day itself.
Ed
Employers “having” to let you vote is by no means universal. There’s no provision for such in Michigan, for example.
Polls are open for hours and hours, and if you can’t make the poll in person, you can register absentee. If you can’t make it to the polls on election day, then we just regard it as a “too bad for you” type of thing, since there are other options available. Yeah, that means that if I miss the polls for some reason tomorrow, then it’s just too bad for me.
OP asked about other non-US voters. In my experience in Canada, I never had more than a five minute wait. Also, we used a pencil on a paper ballot, rather than punching holes or pushing buttons.
On my ballot there will be 10 elective offices (from President down to State Representative and county council represenative)
Two amendments to my state constitution
Four state referenda
Four county tax issues
And votes to retain or turn out 19 judges
So I will be voting on 39 separate items. Thank heaven there are no local tax issues and our municipal government is elected at a different time.
It was meant to benefit farmers, to give them enough time to walk to the nearest polling place without having to travel on the sabbath.
Quoth Darryl Lict:
Here in Montana, early voting is absentee voting. I went down to the county courthouse on Thursday, a volunteer handed me a clipboard and I filled out a form requesting an absentee ballot while waiting in line, I handed it to a lady at a desk and showed her my ID (a cardboard dealie mailed for free to all registered voters) and she handed me a piece of paperwork authorizing me for an absentee ballot, I followed the line to another desk where I traded that piece of paper for a ballot and a couple of envelopes to put it in, then I walked around the corner to the courthouse lobby where some privacy screens were set up, filled in the ovals, sealed it in the envelopes, and handed it to another volunteer who put it directly into a ballot box sitting right there. Total time was about ten minutes, though it might have been longer if I hadn’t researched all of the initiatives and races in advance.
Oops - meant to post this in another thread.
To answer you question, I don’t think I have ever voted on more than 1 issue at a time. We elect parliamentarians - on European, national, provincial and municipal levels - but every election has its own date; same goes for the EU constitution referendum.
Speculation - There was a lot of concern about eligible voters being denied an opportunity to vote in the 2004 election - people incorrectly removed from voting lists, etc. By getting people to vote early, any widespread occurances would be discovered and publicized before the election, if it indeed happened again.