I think 17 states have straight ticket voting. NC is unique in having its straight ticket selections not apply to the presidential race. Totally inexplicable.

To avoid long lines, think about your home precinct's demographics. If you live in the suburbs and most people commute into the city to work, then queues will be longest in the morning, before work, or in the evening, after work.

Personally, I voted early, two weeks ago. I showed up at 8:40am and there was literally no line at all. In and out in ten minutes, and that includes dorking around with the voting machine UI so I could write a blog post about it.

Here in Canada, SWMBO & I regularly vote at the "advance (early) polls", weeks before the main event.

This year, with our month-long trip to Italy beginning just days after the election was called, we went in to vote before even the advance polls were open.

Since nominations weren't even completed back then, we used blank ballots and hand wrote in the candidate's name.

We enjoy voting, but wish it were not necessary as often as it has been of late.

I didn't realize that the straight-ticket not including the President and Vice President was law. I figured it was just the vagaries of the board of elections. I wonder what the reasoning was for that.

I bet it gets changed in the general assembly this year.

Exactly what is done here, San Joaquin County, California. There is a reader in each polling place, the ballot is read and goes directly into an internal hopper. Spoiled ballots are rejected, accounted for, and the voter is given another to mark.

Edit: The ballots themselves are a bit larger than an 8.5x11 inch piece of paper. There is a special envelope that holds the ballot, hiding the marks, ballot and envelope are held to the machine where the ballot is sucked out, maintaining your vote's secrecy.

I did enjoy this line from Plastic: "If you experience an election lasting longer than four hours, consult your doctor"...

Peter

Long lines are exacerbated by electronic voting machines. If there aren't enough machines, the queues just keep growing. In places with paper-based voting, additional voting booths can be cobbled together from cardboard boxes on spare desks and tables, if need be.

Still, even with old-school paper ballots, we're seeing stories of long queues. My fear is that this will convince our political leaders that vote-by-mail is the solution. ("It works for Oregon, so it will clearly work everywhere else!") VBM is attractive in that there's never a line. It's also clearly a disaster in that it makes it far too easy to sell your ballot.

How big of a problem is selling votes? I would think that anything on a large enough scale to be effective would be extremely difficult to get away with.

I know when my absentee ballot was lost in the mail the worker at the registrar's office just marked it as spoiled in the computer and gave me a new one. Multiple submits with the last one counting seems like it would solve the problem. You could add a count-this-and-not-future-ballots checkbox if you'd like to let someone submit a last minute poser-ballot to make the buyer/intimidator happy.

On a different topic, I think it's outrageous that absentee ballots require stamps. Mine even requires two stamps to actually have correct postage.

Prior to the secret ballot's Australian invention in the 1850's (and world-wide adoption by the 1890's), votes were in no way anonymous, and bribery/coercion was rampant.

If you want to give up on anonymity, I can tell you a great voting system. We'll publish everybody's name in the newspaper with how they voted and give you up to a week to correct it. That will do wonders for accuracy. But tell me, do you really want that?

Yup, as was mentioned over in the parallel thread. Fascinating reading...

On PBS's Nightly Business Report last night there was actually a story about how this might be the last election which uses electronic voting machines and how many of the voting machine makers have either gone bankrupt or might throw in the towel as the machines have become enormously unpopular with state and local purchasers.
Also mentioned that Diebold has gotten the most (presumably bad) press but the least share of the profit from machine sales.

If this is the end of the electronic voting machines for now, then Good Riddance I say.

On matthew_k's point about vote selling, I just wanted to comment that an article I once read (perhaps in Technology Review (?) ) about electronic voting mentioned that just a slight, subtle, hard-to-detect shifting of the vote count could often have a major effect on highly contested races. And that anyone with any sense wouldn't cause the rigged vote to be "100% one way in any given precinct".

I presume this also applies to a lesser degree with vote selling, though it's probably much harder to coordinate and much more likely to be detected.

I dunno. I'd think that human nature, and flaws in human organizational systems, would indicate that it'd be easier to get people to throw elections (ie, deliberately miscount hand ballots, etc.) than it would be to hack voting machines. That's probably part of the reasoning behind the argument for having electronic voting in the first place.

Someone pointed out to me at lunch today why the law is that way. It was a totally partisan effort by NC Democrats to allow people to vote Republican in the national election and vote Democratic in local elections. As it turns out, it seems to have worked. NC has a long history of voting R for president but voting D for local office, or at least having D candidates be viable, which is much more than can be said for most other southern states.

So I take back my prediction.

Surely the mechanisation of vote fraud, like all mechanisation, is about the multiplication of effort. To suborn a national election by mis-counting hand ballots, and do it by a small enough and widespread enough margin to not get caught, you need to suborn at least one person per voting precinct. How much easier, to suborn one person per voting machine manufacturer? or perhaps someone with warehouse keys just before the machines are sent out?

Also, paper ballots can be re-counted, as long as you've kept ballot boxes under reasonable physical security. So actual mis-counting, as opposed to stuffing, would come up on a re-count. There's no audit trail for an electronic voting machine, unless you count ones policed by the same people you didn't trust to make the voting machines work right in the first place.

Peter

How about this: Have the machine print out a paper ballot that lists only the selected candidates, but then require the voter to manually mark that ballot for each candidate. I don't know that that would work, but it seems like a reasonable idea to study.

The challenge is minimizing the difficulty of the task for the voter. Any additional thing you ask a voter is something they can get wrong. Once you look at things through a lens like this, it really changes your thinking. That's why plain vanilla bubble-form paper ballots are so attractive: the task you're asking the voter to do is straightforward and simple (with the clear exception of straight ticket issues).

In essence, complexity is the dragon that we need to slay. Anything that can reduce complexity is desirable, even if that means changing things around. Example 1: North Carolina's unique straight ticket rules. Example 2: Australia's incomprehensible preference scheme. There are many others.

(In Australia, voters are effectively asked to specify a permutation of maybe 100 different candidates for Parliament. Since this task is virtually impossible to do without error, the parties helpfully offer "macros" where you can say "I'll have what they recommend" with a single checkbox. The major parties will, of course, put their candidates first and will put their natural competition, who voters might rationally desire as a second choice, all the way at the bottom. I'm told that something like 95% of Australians use the "macro" option rather than specifying their own permutation of the candidates.)

It's not even really a macro in Australia. You mark the candidates in order 1 to however many if you want. If you want you can just put a single 1 for just one candidate and then that candidate's preferences are given to the remainder in their order.

The Senate is a whole other world. There's something like 200 or 300 names which you number in order from 1 to however many. Same deal though - you can put a single 1 in.

Also the candidates hand out how to vote cards as you walk in to tell you how they want you to vote.

I just wanted to mention my experience in Fairfax County, VA, where I've voted on electronic machines for years.

This year, my old precinct was still doing the majority of their voting electronically. They had one box for accepting paper ballots waaay in the back, but was (I found out later) almost entirely for curb-side voting for the handicapped.

At my new precinct, before we entered the voting place a woman handed us two paper ballots. Scratch that, she practically shoved them in our hands saying "Take these!" When we got in the room, we noticed three or four electronic voting machines. I asked the person in the room why they weren't using the machines, and she had two responses:

1) she was slightly surprised and perturbed that the woman outside didn't even mention the choice of the machines

2) she claimed that the machines would be banned in the area soon

I don't know if this was true, but I still find it surprising. I've used the machines for years.

Some rather interesting challenged ballots from the Minnesota Senate race.

Clearly one or two of those were people yanking the Board of Election's chain, but other people are apparently just stupid.

That's brilliant. Lizard People FTW!