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| Authored by: blaisepascal on Saturday, August 25 2012 @ 11:18 PM EDT |
Are elections in Greece or Zimbabwe as complicated as
elections in the US?
In the 2008 general election, on my ballot there were two
national elections, three state-wide elections, and a ballot
proposal, in addition to a number of local elections.
Each election had up to 10 parties fielding candidates, each
listed on a separate line (so for President, I could have
voted for the Democratic Party candidate, Obama, the
Republican Party candidate, McCain, the Working Families
Party candidate, Obama, the Conservative Party candidate,
McCain, etc).
In each election, the candidates are tallied by party. For
example, statewide, Obama received 4,645,332 votes on the
Democratic line, and 159,613 votes on the Working Families
Line. The totals for the same candidate are summed across
parties, so Obama won the state with 4,804,945 votes, but
the individual party tallies have an effect on the status of
the party in the state.
I get the impression from most people who say "Paper Ballots
are easy to do and tally" aren't used to doing elections as
complicated as we do in the US. Most descriptions of how
easy they are, like yours, make the assumption that a ballot
has a single race on it, and can thus be sorted into a
single pile for each candidate, or (like the Grecian ceramic
ballot) that there are only two candidates in the election.
I could be wrong; it could be other jurisdictions have paper
ballots as complicated as those in most of the US but have
come up with fast and simple ways to tally them by hand.
But it's not something I've seen a lot of evidence for.[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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