Not everyone in the world lines up to vote
Nov. 4th, 2008 10:58 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
glaurung11 AM on election day in the US, and already the news is full of stories of people waiting in line for hours on end to vote. And various people from other countries, like "mirrormirror" from England (in the comments), confusedly asking Americans why it is that they have to wait in line so long, to which the Americans patiently explain that they have much longer ballots than do people in other countries, so it takes longer.
Much has been said about how Americans vote for everyone from President and representative to mayor and dog catcher, and how this creates baroque ballots that take a long time to count by hand, which in turn requires the use of complex and expensive voting machines created by companies owned by Republican supporters, that may or may not have "bugs" that cause them to preferentially lose votes for Democratic candidates.
Very, very few people are talking about the fact that Florida (to take one, possibly atypical example out of 50), with 18 million people, has 900 polling stations if I read this article correctly. Assuming 70% of the Florida populace are eligible to vote (probably higher considering the ratio of retirees to children there), that's still 14,000 voters per polling station, or, with 60% turnout (higher than in any of the last three or four elections in the US), 8,400 voters per precinct, minimum. If polls there are open for 12 hours on election day, that's 700 voters per hour.
In contrast, most Canadian provinces set the maximum number of eligible voters per polling station (table E1) to between 275 and 450. So in an entire day of voting, even with 100% turnout, a typical Canadian polling station would have to handle less than half the voters that a typical Florida polling station would have to handle in one hour with 60% turnout.
And this is the invisible elephant in the room whenever there is discussion of how to fix the broken US election system. I'm sure there are states which have adequate numbers of polling stations, but there are also many states which absolutely do not. And for those states, all this talk of how voting machines are vitally necessary, of how "chaos," long lines, polling stations running out of ballots and people getting discouraged and going home because they didn't want to wait 8 hours in line to vote is just normal, business as usual, nothing to see here, all that is just TOTAL BULLSHIT.
If Florida had 25,000 polling stations, then there wouldn't be any lineups, and there wouldn't be much of a need to spend money on expensive voting systems that don't work and aren't accurate or unbiased, because, with half a dozen poll workers (and a dozen party representatives to look over their shoulders) you could count each ballot by hand, even with votes for 30 different elected officials to count, and still get done in just a few hours.
Well, yes, 25,000 polling stations would cost a bit more than 900. But guess what? Democracy isn't free. And if you're trying to do democracy on the cheap, then you're doing it wrong.
[Edited to account for variability from state to state, and to refine estimate of eligible voters in Florida]
[eta:] Rhode Island, with a population of ~1 million (by the national average, that gives 700,000 voting age citizens) has 177 polling places this year, or 3,950 eligible voters per polling place.
Much has been said about how Americans vote for everyone from President and representative to mayor and dog catcher, and how this creates baroque ballots that take a long time to count by hand, which in turn requires the use of complex and expensive voting machines created by companies owned by Republican supporters, that may or may not have "bugs" that cause them to preferentially lose votes for Democratic candidates.
Very, very few people are talking about the fact that Florida (to take one, possibly atypical example out of 50), with 18 million people, has 900 polling stations if I read this article correctly. Assuming 70% of the Florida populace are eligible to vote (probably higher considering the ratio of retirees to children there), that's still 14,000 voters per polling station, or, with 60% turnout (higher than in any of the last three or four elections in the US), 8,400 voters per precinct, minimum. If polls there are open for 12 hours on election day, that's 700 voters per hour.
In contrast, most Canadian provinces set the maximum number of eligible voters per polling station (table E1) to between 275 and 450. So in an entire day of voting, even with 100% turnout, a typical Canadian polling station would have to handle less than half the voters that a typical Florida polling station would have to handle in one hour with 60% turnout.
And this is the invisible elephant in the room whenever there is discussion of how to fix the broken US election system. I'm sure there are states which have adequate numbers of polling stations, but there are also many states which absolutely do not. And for those states, all this talk of how voting machines are vitally necessary, of how "chaos," long lines, polling stations running out of ballots and people getting discouraged and going home because they didn't want to wait 8 hours in line to vote is just normal, business as usual, nothing to see here, all that is just TOTAL BULLSHIT.
If Florida had 25,000 polling stations, then there wouldn't be any lineups, and there wouldn't be much of a need to spend money on expensive voting systems that don't work and aren't accurate or unbiased, because, with half a dozen poll workers (and a dozen party representatives to look over their shoulders) you could count each ballot by hand, even with votes for 30 different elected officials to count, and still get done in just a few hours.
Well, yes, 25,000 polling stations would cost a bit more than 900. But guess what? Democracy isn't free. And if you're trying to do democracy on the cheap, then you're doing it wrong.
[Edited to account for variability from state to state, and to refine estimate of eligible voters in Florida]
[eta:] Rhode Island, with a population of ~1 million (by the national average, that gives 700,000 voting age citizens) has 177 polling places this year, or 3,950 eligible voters per polling place.
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(no subject)
Date: 2008-11-04 04:50 pm (UTC)So please to be remembering that this is a state-by-state issue, and varies widely? As is the method in which ballots are cast, which also changes time-to-vote?
I think that it is easy for people living in other countries to disregard the emphasis placed on states' rights in the US. Voting is a state issue.
It is also very easy to assume that all people living in the US have one perspective. This is just as limited as the idea that my country is "trying to do democracy on the cheap."
Furthermore, I don't think it was reasonable to expect every last site to be prepared for the increase in turnout. We are expecting 140 million votes today, when we've only had 110 million in the past. That burden has not been spread evenly.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-11-04 05:14 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-11-04 07:54 pm (UTC)So how does that work?
I've been a scrutineer in Canadian elections, I know how much time it takes to process an elector - even a chatty one who wants to discuss the weather with every single one of the elections officials and scrutineers and other voters in the polling station, or a confused one who's never done this sort of thing before - and get them from the door of the polling station to the voting booth, and from the voting booth back out the door again. Even if it takes 10 times as long inside the voting booth because there are more boxes to tick off, or slots to pull, or names to touch on a screen, or whatever mechanism is being used in Ohio, how can a maximum of 175 people ever need to wait in line for five hours?
Seriously, I don't understand where the bottleneck is.