In defense of the sanctimonious women's studies set || First feminist blog on the internet

Voting in a New Conversation

Chally

I recently wrote about my experiences of voting for the first time in a post called Performing my democratic duty…. In the comments, we got into an interesting discussion about how voting works under different systems. For example, I shared that in Australia we actually have compulsory voting, and we ended up having a chat about how that is enforced (there’s an electoral roll and you are fined if you don’t vote) and whether there’s an option to abstain (not a legal one, although many people mess up their ballot so that it isn’t counted).

That conversation about how voting works in different places is something I’d like to continue! Please share how it works where you are or where you’ve been. Is voting compulsory, is it tied to a particular election day, what happens if you can’t vote in person, how do you actually register your vote (electronically, for instance)? And how does this tie in with the government system where you are: do you have a governmental structure like that of the US, with Congress and the Senate, or something else? What determines who gets to be the national/provincial/state/etc leader or leaders? What else is interesting or different about the process?

I’m really looking forward to seeing what you come up with.

24 thoughts on Voting in a New Conversation

  1. Good thread idea – thanks!

    UK: General elections are held for the main Parliament as and when the government feels like it (but no more than 5 years apart). There are proposals to hold them exactly 5 years apart in future to stop the government being able to call elections at the most favourable time for it. There are also local government elections (every four years, but which year depends on where you are in the country, and some areas of the country might be in two overlapping regions of local representation while others only have one), elections to the European Parliament every four years, and in Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland, elections to the devolved governments every four years. There’s usually something to vote for most years, depending on where you live.

    Voting isn’t compulsory. Most people who do vote go to a local polling station (often a community centre or school) and cast their vote on paper. The accessibility of the polling stations is very variable – some have flat access, some don’t, some have tactile voting aids and large print ballot papers, some don’t, some have wheelchair-suitable-height voting booths, some don’t, and so on. They’re all supposed to be fully accessible, but very few actually are. Voting is open from the early morning until 10pm on election day.

    If you can’t (or don’t want to) go vote in person, for whatever reason, you can get a postal vote, which will arrive a couple of weeks before the election, and can be sent in any time before. About 15% of voters do this, nowadays. You can also get a proxy vote, where you authorise someone else to vote on your behalf. There have been lots of complaints about fraud resulting from postal and proxy votes (some with barely concealed racism), but I think the greater legitimate franchise they allow considerably outweighs that in practice.

    If you’re unexpectedly ill on election day, you can get an emergency proxy or postal vote provided you apply before 5pm. You won’t be able to actually post the postal vote, but you can get someone to hand it in at any polling station for you.

    Votes currently use the “first past the post” system like the US (rather than the proportional systems more usual in European countries), but there’s a referendum planned to offer a switch to “alternative vote” as used in Australia (often called “instant runoff vote” in the US). The last election revealed many of the problems with the current system, so hopefully we can get a change to a better one.

    There’s been experimentation with phone-based and internet-based voting in a few pilot studies, but no major moves towards adopting them more generally.

    As far as the election result goes, the leader of the largest party in the lower house after the elections usually forms the government. Occasionally no party has an absolute majority in the lower house, and then things get more complicated, but in general the government has an automatic legislative majority and so doesn’t have many problems pushing forward its agenda. Government ministers are drawn from the more loyal (and occasionally most disloyal and in need of encouraging to loyalty) members from the majority party.

    The upper house is currently not elected. It’s mostly appointees put there by various previous governments, a few bishops of the official church, and around 90 people who are there because their dad was. No-one particularly likes its current form, and there’s been plenty of talk – and not much actual action – over the last decade or two about moving to a fully-elected upper house. Various bits of politics in the early 20th century have ensured that the upper house is definitely less powerful than the lower house, so its undemocratic nature doesn’t matter that much in practice – it can stall a little, and weaken legislation in places, but it very rarely blocks things outright.

  2. Canada: Voting is not mandatory. Here we have in each province a number of ridings (so basically, geographic areas). You vote for a party represenentative in your riding, and if that party wins the vote in your riding then they get a ‘seat’ in the House of Commons. The party that wins the most seats forms the government. The next highest forms the Opposition party. It is possible to win the election without a majority vote. This we call a minority government. They are not particularly powerful, as minority governments are required to have co-operation of the opposition parties when it comes to voting on issues. When budget time comes, they can be forced into a new election if Parliment votes no-confidence.

    The Party itself (right now we have five main contenders -Liberals, Progressive Conservative, New Democratic Party, Bloq Quebecois and Green – and a number of fringe parties) votes for a leader in a pre-election. So basically when you vote on the federal level, you have a number of things to take into consideration – which party platform you support, who you think would make a good leader, and which local rep you think would make the best representative in parliament.

  3. UK as well, but I live abroad, so I have to nominate a proxy and ask her to vote for me. (I could also register for a postal vote, but the forms are only sent out when the election is called, and it’s often impossible to get them back in time).

  4. US, Cambridge, MA here.

    For our state and federal elections, we’re pretty much the US standard: first Tuesday after the first Monday of November; primary elections held on a slightly more variable schedule. Voting is not compulsory, and we vote by filling in bubbles on a ballot and sending them through a reader. And, at least at my polling place, we get stickers! Winner is the person who gets the plurality of the vote for all but presidential elections; then we’ve got the idiot Electoral College.

    However, for our city council and school board elections, we do single transferable voting, which I think is AWESOME. On your ballot, you mark bubbles for your favorite, then second favorite, and so on, for all the candidates you approve of—and leave blank those you don’t approve of. Then there’s an algorithm (Cambridge uses the Cincinnati method) that uses that input to select a group of councilors.

  5. I’m also from the US. Voting is not mandatory and very few people do vote. There are a number of different methods used across different districts. Some use a punch card, some use a machine with a lever, some use the scan tron method that Nonnymouse mentions. What method is used is based on state and local law (though there are federal laws in respect to coercion and counting). For those who cannot go to the polling place (including people with disabilities, people living abroad, students out of state), they can get an absentee ballot by filling out the form for their state. This is a paper ballot (I am not aware of any federal level election where a state allows electronic absentee voting), with a layout that varies state to state. Blind people and other people with disabilities who cannot fill it out themselves can use help, but the helper has to sign a statement saying that this is purely the vote of the disabled person and they can be prosecuted for fraud if they try to vote for someone.

    Winner is whoever gets the highest number of votes. However, the US has a de facto (though not officially instituted in the law) two party system that actively works to prevent and obstruct third parties.District rigging and a number of other schemes are set in place to structually prevent third party runs and victories. In many elections, the de facto options are voting for either the democrats or the republicans and, if you don’t like either party’s platform, your options are to not vote, to write in someone (who won’t win), or to try and run a third party (who will be pretty nastily blocked by the two parties). The dems and repubs work together pretty darned quick when someone challenges the two party system.

  6. In New York State, the voting itself works like voting in much of the rest of the United States as described by Nonnymouse above. But what’s weird and creepy is what goes on around the election. In every other state I’ve lived in, all households with registered voters or all registered voters (depending on the state) got voter information guides that gave each candidate a space to describe their platform and any ballot measures got described, a breakdown of their fiscal impact, then pros, cons, rebuttal to pro, and rebuttal to cons from various interested parties, and the makeup of these guides were overseen by members of all the parties with enough representation to show up on the ballots. Apparently this is just a West Coast thing.

    In New York they treat candidates platforms like a state secret and you’re just supposed to vote the way your told to by your church or your union or your newspaper which is, of course, a business with its own agenda. People think they are doing their due diligence just by reading the local paper. Sorry, but I’ve seen too many local issues only covered by obscure free local zines and major newspapers in the UK and Mexico because the truth hurt the political objectives didn’t meet the editorial direction of the major local newspaper. So it’s very creepy when there’s no convenient information source that is institutionally designed to get some degree of objectivity.

  7. I hope this is interesting, rather than dull. Here goes.

    Where I grew up, in Alabama, voting is not compulsory. Sometimes I wish it were, since turnout varies considerably from election to election. On a runoff election or midterm like the sort we’re about to have in a few days, turnout is usually half what it is during the Presidential election. Sometimes it’s less than 15 percent, which makes me really sad.

    There is a patchwork system of city, state, and federal elections in place. State and federal elections are held on the same day, usually. Municipal elections often are not. Primary elections for state and federal office are held usually in June. In those, one has to choose one of two ballots: Republican or Democrat. If no candidate for any office achieves over 50%, then a runoff is called, usually to be held three or four weeks later. The winner of that goes on to November.

    The November election is the General, whereby Republicans and Democrats run against each other on the same ballot, which is uniform regardless of how one intends to vote. In June, one can only vote for candidates of one party (unless one writes in the name of someone else). In November, one is free to vote for both Democratic and Republican candidates.

    Alabama’s constitution is over 100 years old and has more amendment than the Soviet Constitution. But they won’t change it for lots of petty reasons. And there’s no such thing as home rule, meaning that a local issue in one county (there are 67 in Alabama) has to be voted on by the entire state. I honestly could care less whether Blount County vendors can sell peanuts after sundown on Tuesdays, but I have to vote on it anyway.

    One can vote absentee, but it requires a surprisingly tedious amount of paperwork. The fear of voter fraud is so extreme that one has to use 3 separate envelopes, get the ballot notarized, and provide proof of identity before mailing back.

    Alabama has always used paper ballots that look like huge Scantron forms. It makes me much less worried when a paper trail exists, though when I lived in Georgia, I voted on a computer. I remember leaving the polling place hoping that my vote actually got counted.

  9. Absentee voting is a bit of a process here, too, and there are very limited circumstances under which you are allowed to register to permanently have your ballot sent to you. I know someone who did it, only to be fined one year because she supposedly didn’t vote! They didn’t fine her after all when they realised that they or the postal service had lost the vote, but I just wonder if they ever counted her vote after all that trouble…

  10. I’m in the US, the state of Oregon in particular. Others have already given an overview of some standard US voting procedures, so I just want to comment on something particular to Oregon (and maybe some other states too, though I’m not sure).

    All of our voting in the state is by mail, and I love it. A couple weeks before the elections you get your ballot in the mail along with a booklet containing info about all the candidates and measures on the ballot. The candidates all write their own little blurb, then there are statements by different organizations and people who support them. The full text of all the measures is included, as well as statements for and against them written by different groups and individual people. I absolutely love this voting method and don’t understand why more states don’t do this. It encourages you to really sit down, learn about the candidates and measures, and make an informed, reasoned decision about how to vote. You don’t have to go the polling station and wait in line, or feel rushed. (Personally, I’ve never actually been in a voting booth – before I lived in OR, I always happened to be gone on election day and voted by absentee ballot). You put your ballot back in the mailbox, or if you want, you can go down to the polling place anytime in the week before the election and drop it off in person. The whole system just seems to encourage a more informed electorate, and makes it easier for more people to vote.

  11. Also UK here. There’s a couple of bits missing from the earlier description, because elections for the European Parliament (whose powers are unclear to most people) are arranged on a candidate-list basis where votes are cast for parties and then seats are assigned in proportion to the number of votes cast for each party, with the candidates at the top of the list allocated a seat first. I don’t know specifically which PR system is used in the European Parliament elections to calculate who gets how many seats (the last election night coverage got quite complicated explaining how it worked).

    In local council elections, we are also often asked to vote for two or more candidates on the same ballot paper, but I’ve no idea how those are counted! It pays to read carefully the instructions on each individual paper, because IIRC the County Council, District Council and Parish/Town Council all tend to have slightly different rules from each other (such as how many candidates you’re supposed to select, for example, and how to mark them).

  12. Interesting discussion. As a USian, I would only add that primaries are usually “closed,” meaning that you have to be registered with the party you’re voting on. Also, some districts (like mine, unfortunately) are so heavily skewed towards one party that the dominant party’s primary essentially determines the winner, with the general election being mostly a formality. Of course, this doesn’t mean that people will actually show up for the primary. Compulsory voting is sounding better and better to me. Also, I’m with nobody re the dearth of actual information about candidates. They run tidbits in the local papers, and some distribute campaign literature, but that’s about it.

  13. Hi. I’m from Germany (though I don’t currently live there).

    Voting is not compulsory. All citizens are registered anyway (whenever you move somewhere, you have to go to city hall at the new town and register yourself), so the ones over 18 automatically get sent an invitation to vote. You take that with you when you go to the place that’s being used for the voting process in your local area. That’s generally how it works, you show up in person and go into a little cubicle and mark a paper ballot. Alternatively, you can register for voting via mail, at least for the federal elections.

    There are two houses in Germany, one (the “Bundesrat” or federal council) essentially represents the regions that make up the “federal” republic of Germany. Who gets to sit in there depends on what party/parties are in power in each regional parliament. (When I say region, I mean something like Bavaria.) What you generally refer to as the German parliament would be the “Bundestag”, which also elects the Chancellor (the people do not get to vote for the head of state directly, only indirectly by determining the composition of the Bundestag).

    What I find noteworthy is the nature of the Bundestag. Half of the seats are given away in a direct election system (the country is split into district, each political party mounts a candidate for each district, the winner from each district takes it all and goes into the Parliament), the other half is filled in a relative system. When the voter fills out their ballot for federal elections, they have two votes. The first is for a candidate (the one I just explained), the second is for a party as a whole. (These two do not have to match). The other half of the parliament is then filled up with people from each party according to what percentage of the second votes the party got.
    During the Weimar Republic (the first German democracy which met its demise at the hands of Hitler), it was purely a relative system, i.e. the whole parliament worked the way as those second votes do now. Combined with the fact that the threshold of 5% for parties to be able to enter the parliament did not exist, this was a disaster as the parliament was full of dozens of tiny splinter parties that had to form large, unstable coalitions to get majorities and new elections happened every few months when those coalitions fell apart. We learned from that, which is why we now have both the half-half system and the 5% threshold.

  14. one thing that has always bothered me about the US system is if you miss the deadline to register to vote, you can’t vote. in Canada, there is no deadline to register to vote. you’re encouraged to register beforehand and most do, but you can show up to the polls, register, then walk to the other side of the school gym and vote. easy peasy! i’ve always felt that if you’re enfranchised you’re enfranchised, regardless of whether you sign up in time.

    i like that USians get to vote for their president, senators and congress folk separately, unlike Canadians who basically vote for a party, as Andrea explained above. in fact, i think it’s terrific that you can vote for your senators at all. in Canada, they’re cushy patronage appointments and our senate has no actual power. the current PM makes his friends senators and they sit around collecting massive honoraria for doing absolutely eff all.

  15. Violet: that deadline to register to vote thing irks me too. In 2008 my parents moved to a new state in October and missed the deadline to register in their new state before the general election, and couldn’t vote in their old state since they had already officially changed their residency. They were pissed, and rightly so, that they didn’t get to vote that year, especially because it was such a big election. All eligible voters should be able to vote, no matter what the circumstances. It’s a basic civic right. Some states have day-of registration, which is great, but a lot of states don’t, and it should be fixed.

  16. Australians have a deadline for voter registrations too. It was brought in by the previous conservative government, and to my mind was partly introduced to disenfranchise people who would vote for non-conservative parties – students and new voters.

    What weirds me out about U.S. elections is registering as being for a particular party. A person’s intended vote should be private.

    cim – that was fascinating. How do overlapping local governments work? Sounds inconvenient at best.

  17. In Finland voting is not compulsory. Everybody 18+ years old is automatically registered to vote and is sent an invitation to vote by mail a couple of months before. The invitation tells you which election it is (parliament election every 4 years, presidential every 6 years) and where you need to go to vote. Everybody living in a certain area goes to vote on a specific date (always a Sunday) to a specific place (usually a school). The voting place is open from somewhere around 9am to 7pm or thereabouts.

    There is also a pre-voting time, around couple of weeks long a few weeks before the real voting time. During this time people can take their invitation and go to any post office and vote there and the vote gets sent onwards.

    For the people who are unable to get to any voting place, they can request an official to come to their home, during the pre-voting period.

    The couple of times that I have voted from abroad, I had to go during the pre-voting period to a Finnish embassy abroad and they sent my vote onwards.

  18. Amazing Kim: In the US, you don’t have to register as being part of a party. You can be registered independent or unaffiliated. And even if you are registered as a member of a party, you don’t have to vote for that party’s candidates – your actual vote is still secret. Some states have party-based primaries, and in that case you have to be registered as part of a party, but it’s not that big of a deal. In 2008, I changed my registration to Democrat just so I could vote in the primary, then promptly changed it back to unaffiliated after the primary was over.

  19. I’m in Minnesota, in the US. Basically the same as the other US states as described above, but with a few differences. In Minnesota, we have same-day registration, which is awesome (this is the case for several US states– there aren’t always deadlines to register). I voted in my first gubernatorial primary this year. I always skipped primaries in the past because I was incorrectly informed that you must register for a party to vote in them, which I didn’t want to do. I was interested in voting during this years primary, though, because I am highly interested in Tom Emmer not being our next governor. Turns out, you don’t have to register for a party, after all. The only restriction is that if you vote for one party for one office, you may not vote for a different party for any other offices, or your ballot becomes invalid.

    Also, in Minneapolis, MN, in 2006, we voted to establish Instant Runoff Voting for city elections, which I’m so unbelievably happy about! The only problem, for me, anyway, is that I no longer live in Minneapolis proper and my new city of residence is much too conservative to adopt IRV. Sigh.

  20. Great topic! I’m from PA. Considering elections for the State are coming up (Nov 10th) I and a community newsletter I work with have been doing a ton of research in an attempt to get the full scope of the election. There’s so much information and awareness required to be an active, aware voter and its near impossible to do all the homework required when people delve into the political process for the first time. We compiled a primer for first time voters that I hope will be helpful, but reminded me of just how daunting the political process is for a good deal of Americans. There are reasons voter turnout is particularly low among young urban Americans…the sheer time it requires to get the requisite information to vote in an educated manner is surely one of them.

  21. One thing that is unique about PA I found is that its one of a few states/commonwealths that restores the right to vote to ex-convicts after their debt to society is paid.

  22. Just found your blog…

    I am getting ready to move to Chile with my Chilean husband (lived there for 4 years previously). In Chile, voting is compulsory once you have registered, which has led many young people NOT to register. Men and women also, strangely, vote separately, at different voting precincts. The reason is unclear, I think that is how it was done when women first got the vote and it just stayed that way. There are a much wider variety of parties than in the US (where I am from), even for president there are usually 4-5 serious potential candidates. After the Allende presidency (who won with 30 something %), and the Pinochet dictatorship, the laws changed requiring that the president elect must get over 50% of the vote. So there is almost always primaries and then a run-off between the top two candidates.

  23. I’m from Australia. In Victoria we can vote in local council elections via the post. Voting at local/state and federal levels isn’t compulsory as every one seems to think. What is compulsory if you are on the electoral roll, is turning up at one of the voting booths in the electorate you live in and having your name signed off. I could take the papers they hand me and shove them straight into the bin after that if I so desired. We have a single electoral roll for federal, state and local elections. I agree with Amazing Kim’s comments about the previous conservative governemnt’s desire to dis-enfranchise new voters by changing the registration closing date. I also have to add that the thing about being registered with a party affiliation or a non-affiliation from here in Australia looks like a non-secret ballot. I know I always take a voting gide from everyone handing them out because I don’t want to give my vote away so to speak.

    We have two choices when voting. the first is that we can follow a party line with our preferences. That is, take in to the booth with us a how-to-vote guide from the party of our choice and number the boxes for the lower house/house of representatives (which is the house of parliament that forms government) according to that list. These guides are handed out by volunteers to anyone in the voting queue that wants them. The second option is to simply number the boxes as I wish. However not to number every box means the vote is invalid.

    When it comes to senate or upper house voting (described as the house of review or the state’s house) the ballot papers are the size of a table cloth and divided in half. If I ‘vote above the line’ I simply put a number ‘one’ against a party name and the preferences will flow according to the party list. Otherwise I can vote ‘below the line’ which means that I must number every box. There are usually around 60+ names so counting is needed and weighing up whether I want the Citizen’s Electoral Council or Steve Fielding from Family First to go last is important. In this system you can’t not assign a preference even if it is for someone or a party you don’t want to spit on.

    Interesting discussion. Especially in teasing out the compulsory stuff. I know that here, lots of people complain about being forced to vote for people they don’t believe in but my view is someone has to govern the country and we all have to take responsibility for that and for trying to make it better.

  24. Amazing Kim: Depending on where you are in the country, there may be a County Council, which manages local government activities across a wide region, a City (urbanish) or District (ruralish) Council that manages a different set of local government activities across a smaller region (generally there will be several City/District Councils within the area of a single County Council). In most parts of the country there will also be a Parish Council, which covers an area associated with a historic church parish, and is mostly about local voluntary/community stuff (they have tiny budgets): despite the geographical link with church parishes, they are secular organisations. In urban areas, the Parish Council may sometimes be a Town Council instead.

    Each Council has different powers and responsibilities, which can cause confusion when there are problems to be dealt with (for instance, the streetlights and road may be County Council, but the pavements by the road on which the streetlights are mounted may be District Council; or road markings might be County Council, but roadkill removal District Council … so they paint around them). It can be quite inconvenient in that respect, but there is the advantage in the larger counties that the District Council has a more manageable area to run local services for and so can be more responsive for those services better delivered on a more localised basis.

    In recent years there’s been a move to having Unitary Authorities, which combine the powers and responsibilities of the County and City/District layers of government into a single layer of government. They’ve mainly been introduced in and around large towns and cities, but I live in an area where the functions of six rural District Councils and a fairly-rural City Council were merged under their umbrella County Council. It’s worked relatively well despite initial scepticism, so that experiment might continue in future.

    (This is in England: the other three sub-countries of the UK have slightly different local government systems but I don’t know enough about them)

    SnowdropExplodes: Yep, we don’t like having simple systems of government here, do we. Other electoral systems in use: elections to Northern Ireland’s European Parliament seats are held by Single Transferable Vote rather than List Proportional Representation (they also use STV for the NI Assembly and local government elections); elections to the Scottish Parliament use the Additional Member System (similar to the German system Christina described); elections to Scottish local government now use Single Transferable Vote, and it’s all a horribly inconsistent mess…

    I went to a count for an English local government election a few years back, as an observer for a friend who was standing. Each vote you cast gets counted separately, and then the candidate(s) with the most total votes are elected. Think of it as normal “first past the post”, but you get two (or three) votes on the condition you don’t vote for the same candidate more than once.

Comments are currently closed.