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do keep in mind that in some of these locations you have a group of democratic election officials, a group of republican election officials, and a group of non-partisan election officials and they all have to agree on the count before it goes into a memory card and then sometimes the memory card has to be driven to a separate location to be uploaded to the full official database.
does lombardy have such glorious features?
edited for spelling.
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Bask in our exceptionalism!!!
Truly a beacon of confusion for the entire planet.
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To be fair, I think part of the difference is that in general, France and Italy don’t allow voting by mail. The only exceptions are citizens living abroad- and in France, even they have to vote in person at a consulate or nominate a proxy for Presidential elections.
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Had this been an actual democracy, we would have never been saddled with this warm baggie of moldy diarrhea in the first place. We wouldn’t have been stuck with GW either. **
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Remember: in some states they were not allowed to count the mail-in votes until election day, and thanks to COVID there are waaaaayyyyy more mail-in votes than previous elections. Opening a million envelopes, removing the forms and tallying what they say takes time.
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I happen to go on a 3 week vacation to several countries starting 2 days after the 2000 election. Newspapers were easier to find than getting on internet. So I had an interesting view of foreign opinion on developments.
Week 1 Laughter: Those silly Americans. Can’t even count.
Week 2 Fascination: Check this out, Americans have extensive rules and Presidential succession plans going back 200 years that cover all sorts of contingencies.
Week 3 Grudging respect: Where are the riots? In most other countries this divided, there would be strikes and/or riots. But Americans are going about their normal lives uninterrupted.
We can hope things follow a similar trajectory this time. That we manage fucked up better than anyone.
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In Italy voting is paper based.
Voters get a special pencil and one or more paper ballot, they put in separate ballot boxes.
Next for every vote the ballot is opened and put on a table one of the polling workers get one ballot and open it, another one read the vote and the polling secretary keep the count, then the counted poll goes in a pile. There are representative of the various parties that could look at the count and could say something, at the end the results and the observation are written on a paper log. A sheet for every poll is written, signed and stamped and collected by a cop that goes to the city hall. When I did work at a polling station the sheet was faxed or even dictated to the central polling count, and from there to Rome.
at the end of the polling all the ballot were put in a bag with the special pencils the official stamp.
the log was put in another bag.
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if only . . .
That also exemplifies why I’m sad to see in person voting fade in importance. All of us gathering on one day in several locations to make important decisions is a ritual that, despite all our differences, we can do together. We as a group are making a choice as opposed to we as individuals are choosing. Ritual helps bind us as a community.
Oh, I understand the practical and political reasons for early and mail in voting. But we should recognize there is something lost too.
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Which side should lose?
- The side that consistently organizes peaceful protests.
- The side that brings guns and no masks to every “protest”.
Ideal is for election results in favor of Biden to be unassailable. Enough electoral votes for pending lawsuits in some states to be unable to change the outcome.
Because 2020 is such a shit show. I expect Biden to get 270 votes, and for a faithless elector to screw it up. Democrats will shrug and claim they tried their best. And I’ll wonder what college they attended that lets you pass with a 50% grade.
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Canadian election results are usually known the next day, and Canada definitely allows mail-in ballots. They don’t always get included in the initial call, they’re generally not needed, but like, even in recent provincial elections where people were mailing tons of ballots in the timing wasn’t particularly different from previous elections. Certifying the results takes longer, but that’s not because of the initial count taking a long time.
Last time I checked Canada spends probably a little more per election but not a lot more. I feel pretty strongly the US should mandate election standards for the states, rationalizing how they’re done, but obviously that’s not going to be possible for at least 2 years, if the will is even there at all.
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The long lines of people waiting to vote that we see in the news coverage- this is unheard of in Europe. Regular citizens in european democracies are not forced to run the gauntlet in order to vote. They are rightly agog when they see how common it is here.
Not much of a stretch to see how counting those same votes might go differently as well.
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biggest election turn out in history and trump still loses –– trump: “I’ll sue! wah wah wah wah…”
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That’s dubious since they give it away for free (IMO it’s overpriced), but the best-selling paper is probably the Daily Heil so there’s no honour to defend here
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Sunderland should run some boot camps for US election officials -
52 minutes after the polls closed (38,021 votes) in Houghton and Sunderland South Washington and Sunderland West (37,334 ballots) 33 minutes later, then Sunderland Central (42,463 votes cast) 16 minutes after that. (2010 numbers)
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All owned by DMG.
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According to ABC news current results, Loving County, Texas has currently counted 78% of its votes; and they have less than a hundred voters.
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None of this even had to happen.
You can blame the fact that many states have Republican-led state legislatures and they wouldn’t allow mail-in votes to be counted early despite knowing full well that there would be a massive VBM turnout. They seem to think this gives some kind of legitimacy to Trump’s claims of election shenanigans since he started off with huge leads in several states only to see those leads evaporate as the VBM votes were tabulated.
tl;dr: fucking Republicans.
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Australia has a population of 25 million, compulsory voting (turnout above 90%), and uses a “preferential voting” system: much more laborious than simple-majority counting. It’s done on paper, and the results are known before midnight. I’m not enough of an expert to know why it’s quick, but I suspect that decentralized counting plays a role.
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