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Originally Posted by DanaC
We have 'postal ballots' here, which people can elect to have instead of going to the ballot stations. It's particularly useful for pensioners or people with motility issues. All our ballot papers are checked and counted manually though.
When I was elected in the local elections, we went along to the count. . . Out of the 4000 ballot papers for my ward (there were I think 20 wards being counted in that room) there were 9 that were unclear. . . we discounted 5 as genuine spoiled ballots and argued our case as to whether the others could be counted or not. Was fun:P
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Congratulations on getting elected to the office you ran for; way cool.
Yeah, it's really very much the same as this on our side of the pond, and our left-hand side of the continent, official terminology varying, naturally enough, by state: absentee ballot = postal ballot, and is similarly either mailed in, or optionally dropped off in a sealed bag especially for the purpose at any voting precinct in the voter's county of residence -- the rule is you have to do it in your own county. Voting precinct = ward, though more easterly states may use ward. Polling place = ballot station. We also use the term spoiled ballot; our voters get three tries to get it right -- I think there was a time when we once had a lot more drunken voters than is the case nowadays. Nineteenth-century oiling of the electoral machinery -- and the electorate. I've also seen illiterate voters -- Spanish speakers in these cases.
This year is the first year our county went to electronic voting machines; previously ballot cards were IBM punch card things with all the punch holes in a row down the edges and the necessary print bits down the middle, punched with a mechanical puncher on a sliding handle with a mechanism to locate the punch accurately on the for/against or the punch simply... wouldn't. These were called the Datavote punches. The things made a distinctive and now fondly recalled sound in use --
zikk zikk, kachunk, zikk, kachunk -- now the sound of civic involvement is an electronic twitter-tweet, melodious in its own way. It seems less prone to voter error than one interesting development I saw a couple years back: somebody didn't notice the instruction on the Datavote punch-card ballot that said only put one card in the Datavote punch at a time. This young Hercules got all six of the ballot cards into the Datavote at once and drove the punch through every one of 'em. Spoiled ballot!
The punched ballots then went, in ballot boxes under due security, to the County Elections Division for running through punch-card readers. All that's gone now, with optical scanners taking over the job and tabulating the votes right in the precinct's polling place, with Elections then reading and tabulating together the records established by the ballot box electronic scanners, which work about like those optical-scan test forms where you fill in bubbles with soft pencil -- these use black ink, not Sharpie or felt tip as these may bleed through, to complete parted black graphic arrows pointing to the voter's choices. They don't need much of a mark to register, and will immediately kick back a mismarked or over-voted ballot card, duly noting it in a record tape like cash register tape. They are hoping these improvements will allow Elections Department to get home before four the next morning -- they're getting closer, it's said. Electronic count will not completely supplant a hand count, if called for; but the party calling for it pays for the costs.