How We Used To Vote 517
Mr. Slippery writes "Think hanging chads, illegal purges of the voter rolls, and insecure voting machines are bad? The New Yorker looks back at how we used to vote back in the good old days: 'A man carrying a musket rushed at him. Another threw a brick, knocking him off his feet. George Kyle picked himself up and ran. He never did cast his vote. Nor did his brother, who died of his wounds. The Democratic candidate for Congress, William Harrison, lost to the American Party's Henry Winter Davis. Three months later, when the House of Representatives convened hearings into the election, whose result Harrison contested, Davis's victory was upheld on the ground that any "man of ordinary courage" could have made his way to the polls.' Now I feel like a wuss for complaining about the lack of a voter-verified paper trail." The article notes the American penchant for trying to fix voting problems with technology — starting just after the Revolution. This country didn't use secret ballots, an idea imported from Australia, until quite late in the 19th century.
Looks Like The "Good Old Days" (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Voter registration (Score:5, Informative)
It's pretty much the same in Canada. After I turned eighteen I just got voting cards in the mail for Federal, Provincial, and Municipal elections. Where I vote isn't electronic, I'm not sure if there are any plans to move that way.
Re:Voter registration (Score:5, Informative)
Some American please explain me: why do you have voter registration at all? In my country (Netherlands), everyone above 18 is registered by default. I assume this is similar in most of Western Europe. The only caveat is that you have to be registered with your municipality, which you have to do anyhow for various different reasons (municipal tax, getting passports/ID/driving licence ...). A few weeks before an election, you simply get your 'voting ticket' in the mail. You typically take this to a neighborhood school to cast your vote, usually electronically.
Making everyone eligible to vote by default would save a lot of those voter-fraud claims and a lot of effort by the campaigns to get the people registered.
Bottom line - we have to register to vote because only U.S. citizens (without a felony criminal conviction) are allowed to vote. It's a different mind-set in America. People would rebel if they had to "register with their municipality" for no compelling reason, even after several years of Homeland Security.
Registering to vote is a snap, though. When my daughter turned 18, she went to the local county auditor's website and filled in a form that basicaly just asked for her name and street address. A few days later she got her voter registration card.
So the difference between us and you appears to mainly be when we register - you DO have to register, but you do it much earlier and for a broader purpose.
Re:Voter registration (Score:5, Informative)
I feel it's largely due to the nature that all Americans are subject to two major governments at all times - state and federal. Our system is set up so that states control voting on election day, and like most other issues (education, driving, licensing) there is little communication between the states. So if you move from one state to another, you need to tell you new state that you're there and you want to vote.
Voter registration really is more about your state knowing where you are so you can vote for the right people. Certainly, if the federal government handled it, it would be automatic, but we just don't have the federal government in charge of elections (which is fine, we are, at least in theory, more about a collection of states rather than citizens of one large federal government).
Not exactly true (Score:5, Informative)
The states actually determine who is a eligible voter. Some states deny voting privs to convicted felons, some can vote reguardless even in prison and others can vote if there imposed sentence has been served. Personally I think once a mans
sentence has been served he should be eligible to vote else it imposes (taxation without representation) on the individual.
A great many states have poll day registration you walk in with a utility bill, drivers license or something of that sort and
you can register to vote right then and there.
Re:Voter registration (Score:2, Informative)
Some American please explain me: why do you have voter registration at all?
The U.S. does not have any (official) national citizen database (despite attempts to change that), and the various U.S. states do not have them either. As a result, to be able to vote, voter registration is required.
When registering, a citizen typically has to prove their eligibility to vote (which varies by state law), the most popular method being proof of citizenship and the location of your residence.
Of course, don't take my word for it. There's a more thorough discussion of the issue and how it is implemented in various countries around the world (with references) on Wikipedia [wikipedia.org].
Re:Voter registration (Score:3, Informative)
The U.S. does not have any (official) national citizen database (despite attempts to change that), and the various U.S. states do not have them either. As a result, to be able to vote, voter registration is required.
Two words. Selective Service.
Re:Voter registration (Score:3, Informative)
Except only males have to register for the draft.
Re:Voter registration (Score:5, Informative)
Long story short? Because we let people vote who aren't registered for anything else. There are a lot of details, some of which I discuss below, but it all boils down to that: we let people vote who aren't registered for anything else.
> In my country (Netherlands), everyone above 18 is registered by default.
I don't know how it is in the Netherlands, but that system would be impractical here because the people here are free to move around (and often do, across voting district lines, state lines, you name it, without a second thought) without informing anyone. There's no central registry of all citizens in the first place, and there's *certainly* no central registry of where everyone lives. Other than the voter registration, there isn't any other registry that could be used for determining where people can vote and whether they've already voted (possibly in a different polling location) and so forth. The thing most people immediately think of to use instead is the Bureau of Motor Vehicles database of licensed drivers, but that would exclude substantial categories of people on unconstitutional grounds.
Note that it does matter very much which voting district people vote in, not just for determining whether someone has already voted in another polling location, but also because you vote on different stuff. For example, school taxes are voted on by the residents of each school district (and while I suspect you don't here anything much about it overseas because of the inherently local nature of it, people at the local level are often more concerned with the outcome of these local elections than with the state and national ones). US Representatives represent not just the people of a specific state but more particularly the people of a specific congressional district within a state, so for voting purposes it matters which district you're in. And so forth.
Among other things, the Board of Elections has to know *where* to expect you to come and vote, so they can have your name on the list for that location. (Having a list of who is going to come and vote, and checking them off, is the only realistic way to enforce the limit of one vote per person, i.e., to prevent ballot-stuffing.) So you have to let them know where you live ahead of time, so they can put you on the list for your precinct. If you move, you're still registered, but you have to update your registration with the new address if you want to vote in the new polling location (and, thus, on the local issues in your new place of residence).
> The only caveat is that you have to be registered with your municipality, which you have to do
> anyhow for various different reasons (municipal tax, getting passports/ID/driving licence
So you can't vote if you don't live in a municipality? That wouldn't go over so well here. Also, while it varies from one municipality to another, most municipal taxes in the US are levied on either income or property ownership (land, specifically), so no, not everyone who lives in a city, town, or village has to register for tax purposes, or any other reason for that matter. There's a census every ten years, but while participation is encouraged (and there's really no downside), it's not actually mandatory, and I think the privacy nuts (ironically, including a lot of the sort of people who read slashdot) would go bonkers and start filing lawsuits if the government tried to make the census mandatory or give it any legal force.
As for the passports, most Americans don't have them. (Before you react too strongly to that, bear in mind that from here I can travel for two thousand miles in any direction, or three thousand miles to the west, without a passport. This is mostly a very good thing, though it would be nice if it were somewhat easier to find people who speak a foreign language fluently.)
As noted above, the driver's license is something whole categori
Re:Voting the Open-Source Way (Score:4, Informative)
In Indiana (where the voter ID started and ended up with SCOTUS), we have free ID's and transportation if you need it.
There are really no excuses and no reason to not have to prove who you are.
Re:I voted in this manner... (Score:5, Informative)
Granted this was only way back in 2000, but I lived in St. Clair County, IL. It was a small township called French Village
According to wikipedia, there is no French Village township in St. Clair County [wikipedia.org]. However, google maps finds a park called French Village in East St. Louis in St. Clair County in Caseyville township.
At 8am, the mayor knocked on my door and informed my wife and I it was time to vote
The mayor in Caseyville at that time seem to have been George Chance. So that is the guy that came knocking on your door 8am 2000-11-07 dragging you out to vote? Didn't you have to work or something?
We marched down to the fire station with him and twenty other poor people
Also fishy. The townships population is 4300, why did he choose you and 20 other people? Also, must have been quite a walk. There's not that many fire departments in Caseyville...
Re:Founding fathers (Score:4, Informative)
Frankly, if you want to disagree with the Founders, at least attempt to reason at a similar strength as they did. The i-pod in your pocket doesn't give your ideas any extra merit.
It's actually a nomad jukebox, the discman-sized one, thank you very much.
The strongest reason is that the primary reasons I've heard for it's existence in the first place are no longer concerns. One idea was that you needed an electoral college because someone could get the nomination of a party and fool the nation, especially since back in the drafting days, most citizens wouldn't ever see a speech by the canidate. As I've heard it, the thinking was that electors would be able to change their minds to reflect the best interests of the nation if upon coming to washington they realized the citizenry had been duped and the candidate was bad. In modern times, this has not really happened.
The wikipedia page (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_College_(United_States)#Origin_of_name) has a different interpretation than the one I remembered from gradeschool: that the electoral college was supposed to merely nominate canidates for congress to choose, because the forefathers didn't realize elections would come down to two canidates, meaning someone would always get the majority.
So their reasons appear to have no strength and are based off of false predictions.
Against the electoral college is what is for me the most convincing argument: that it makes the "One citizen one vote" ideal a joke. Citizens in less populated state have more of a vote than citizens in more populated states. Three times now, that has meant the candidate who more citizens voted for did not get the presidency.
This is a good visual presentation of counties distorted by population and how they voted in kerry V bush
http://www-personal.umich.edu/~mejn/election/countycartredbluelarge.png [umich.edu]
I can see advantages of the electoral college, but none that justify why one citizen should get a bigger vote than another.
Re:Looks Like The "Good Old Days" (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Congress (Score:5, Informative)
Hmm...too bad then, that here in the US, we switched to allowing the populace to vote for our senators, rather than having them appointed.
Re:Founding fathers (Score:3, Informative)
Voting on potsherds (ostrakon) was for something else. I will let you guess what.
The voting population of Attika never exceeded 200,000 out of about one million, and probably never reached 150,000. That is well exceeded by any US Representative's district. Also, try getting the total population of Alaska, or any other one House member state, to meet in one place. Attika could do it because it was the size of a medium-sized US county, and had lots of women, slaves, and resident foreigners to keep the place running while the Assembly met.
Re:Looks Like The "Good Old Days" (Score:5, Informative)
Card Check Process: Section 2 of EFCA would establish a mandatory card-check recognition process under which an employer would be required to recognize a union as its employees' exclusive bargaining representative once the union presents signed authorization cards from a simple majority of the employees in the work unit the union seeks to represent. The card-check process would take the place of NLRB-supervised secret ballot elections currently used to determine whether a majority of employees want union representation.
Perhaps you'd be willing to provide a citation? And while you're at it, who gets to elect whether a secret ballot or open card signature will be the process used?
Re:Voter registration (Score:2, Informative)
Lets see
When you move, you don't really need to notify anyone.
* Except the DMV.
And the DMV change of the address form already contains voter registration.
* And except your utility companies
* And except the company you work for
* And you probably will fill out USPS change of address form so they forward your email
* And if you are registered for draft (selective service) (applies to all males between 18-25), US government also wants to know where you are. https://www.sss.gov/RegVer/wfAddressChange.aspx
* And if you are an alien, you should send your AR-11 Alien's Change of Address form
So really, when you move, the US government has completely no idea that you moved, Really.
Re:Not exactly true (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Oh, its us evil Republicans! (Score:5, Informative)
Fun facts:
Republicans supported black suffrage (being targeted by the KKK after the 15th amendment, and had greater support, as a percentage, for the Voting Rights Act of 1965 than democrats)
Republicans fought womans suffrage.
If women could not vote, no democrat would have served as president of the United States in the previous 50 years.
This was a completely different Republican party doing those things then today. If you know your American history then you know that at a few points in our history the major party's ideologies have changed in drastic ways. The Republican party you're referring to has quite a few similarities to our modern Democrats.
The modern Republican party, to which you seem to be trying to bolster the image of with these claims, really only took shape after Southern Democrats (of which the majority of them were given that they wanted nothing to do with those darn Republicans freeing the slaves and giving them the right to vote) left the Democratic party in droves because of their support for the civil rights movement. They merged with Northern economic conservatives and bam, you have the modern Republican party.
Kind of a shady history for the current manifestation of the party if you ask me.
Re:Voter registration (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Voter registration (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Voter registration (Score:1, Informative)
I don't have to tell my government (Canada) when I move. They'll just dutifully mail it to my last known permanent address (i.e. the last one they had from driver's license or whatever).
However, I think you're still pretty naiive if you think you don't notify anyone?
Had to transfer your internet connection?
Phone service?
Television?
Health insurance?
And for the government:
Driver's license
Taxes
Also, the health insurance for us is run by the government, so that actually falls in the latter category.
Not true (Score:2, Informative)
This is a nice tale, but it's not true.
When moving, you do have to report your changed address to the DMV.
In the US, the authorities know exactly where you live and many many other things, just like in Europe. The difference is that they're legally obliged to pretend that they don't, resulting in the worst of both worlds: The state knows all about you, but you still have to tell them things they already know, again and again.
Re:Voter registration (Score:1, Informative)
I think the problem with an attitude like yours is that you somehow think Europe is "different" -- and in a worse way. I am an American and this kind of talk disappoints me, and it's more and more common from a certain side of the electorate. More Americans need to understand that people outside the United States have largely the same sensibilities we do. They live their lives much in the same way. They're not "bad". Sometimes their governments are better than ours, and sometimes they're worse. In the end, they want the same basic things we do for themselves and those we care about.
But when the Sarah Palins of the world start talking about "over there" as if it's something we should be ashamed of resembling... That disappoints me, that someone can be so ignorant.
The fact is, as someone pointed out, if you live in the US your name is in a bunch of "big brother" type databases just as it would be in Europe. This whole thread is a bit disappointing because its originator somehow tried to make the point that Americans are special, because they love freedom. That's bullshit.
Oh yeah. And if I can say something a bit more controversial... Lots of non-US-citizens pay US taxes. That's taxation without representation. You know, that whole thing we fought a revolution for. So why then is it so imperative that we keep those people from voting...?