How We Used To Vote

Mr. Slippery writes "Think hanging chads, illegal purges of the voter rolls, and insecure voting machines are bad? The New Yorker looks back at how we used to vote back in the good old days: 'A man carrying a musket rushed at him. Another threw a brick, knocking him off his feet. George Kyle picked himself up and ran. He never did cast his vote. Nor did his brother, who died of his wounds. The Democratic candidate for Congress, William Harrison, lost to the American Party's Henry Winter Davis. Three months later, when the House of Representatives convened hearings into the election, whose result Harrison contested, Davis's victory was upheld on the ground that any "man of ordinary courage" could have made his way to the polls.' Now I feel like a wuss for complaining about the lack of a voter-verified paper trail." The article notes the American penchant for trying to fix voting problems with technology — starting just after the Revolution. This country didn't use secret ballots, an idea imported from Australia, until quite late in the 19th century.

Comments

Re:Congress

[Neoprofin]

Wait, what?

Last time I checked more accountability for elected officials is always better.

no excuses

[Digitus1337]

Think hanging chads, illegal purges of the voter rolls, and insecure voting machines are bad?

Yes.

Voter registration

[photonic]

Some American please explain me: why do you have voter registration at all? In my country (Netherlands), everyone above 18 is registered by default. I assume this is similar in most of Western Europe. The only caveat is that you have to be registered with your municipality, which you have to do anyhow for various different reasons (municipal tax, getting passports/ID/driving licence ...). A few weeks before an election, you simply get your 'voting ticket' in the mail. You typically take this to a neighborhood school to cast your vote, usually electronically.

Making everyone eligible to vote by default would save a lot of those voter-fraud claims and a lot of effort by the campaigns to get the people registered.

Re:Voter registration

[s.bots]

It's pretty much the same in Canada. After I turned eighteen I just got voting cards in the mail for Federal, Provincial, and Municipal elections. Where I vote isn't electronic, I'm not sure if there are any plans to move that way.

Re:Voter registration

[93 Escort Wagon]

Some American please explain me: why do you have voter registration at all? In my country (Netherlands), everyone above 18 is registered by default. I assume this is similar in most of Western Europe. The only caveat is that you have to be registered with your municipality, which you have to do anyhow for various different reasons (municipal tax, getting passports/ID/driving licence ...). A few weeks before an election, you simply get your 'voting ticket' in the mail. You typically take this to a neighborhood school to cast your vote, usually electronically.

Making everyone eligible to vote by default would save a lot of those voter-fraud claims and a lot of effort by the campaigns to get the people registered.

Bottom line - we have to register to vote because only U.S. citizens (without a felony criminal conviction) are allowed to vote. It's a different mind-set in America. People would rebel if they had to "register with their municipality" for no compelling reason, even after several years of Homeland Security.

Registering to vote is a snap, though. When my daughter turned 18, she went to the local county auditor's website and filled in a form that basicaly just asked for her name and street address. A few days later she got her voter registration card.

So the difference between us and you appears to mainly be when we register - you DO have to register, but you do it much earlier and for a broader purpose.

Re:Voter registration

[rnelsonee]

I feel it's largely due to the nature that all Americans are subject to two major governments at all times - state and federal. Our system is set up so that states control voting on election day, and like most other issues (education, driving, licensing) there is little communication between the states. So if you move from one state to another, you need to tell you new state that you're there and you want to vote.

Voter registration really is more about your state knowing where you are so you can vote for the right people. Certainly, if the federal government handled it, it would be automatic, but we just don't have the federal government in charge of elections (which is fine, we are, at least in theory, more about a collection of states rather than citizens of one large federal government).

Re:Voter registration

[photonic]

But don't tell me that you are not already in 10 different databases from the moment you are born. I assume you guys also have to register for a birth certificate, you need to pay taxes at some point so you have a social security number, etc. I really don't see the point.

Re:Voter registration

[Anonymous Coward]

So in the US one can just "arrive" somewhere, move in a random house and everything is ok for the Government? They don't need to know where to send your tax letter or anything? Strange.

Strange? Really? I'd think this is how it should be. For as much as we whine about how the U.S. is turning into a totalitarian state we really do have an incredible amount of freedom. You're still free to come and go and live and work where you please. You're not even legally obligated to get government ID, though it certainly makes life more difficult. But if you don't drive you could easily get by with just a passport, no state ID needed. As with everything the more you want-- driving rights, property ownership, etc-- the more you have to go "on the grid."

As far as a "tax letter", It's your responsibility to file your taxes, the IRS doesn't send you notices (though of course your employer is telling them what you were paid, so it's not that difficult to track you down.)

I'm not saying the U.S. is perfect, but you're not making a case for Europe being much better.

Re:Voter registration

[jonadab]

> Some American please explain me: why do you have voter registration at all?

Long story short? Because we let people vote who aren't registered for anything else. There are a lot of details, some of which I discuss below, but it all boils down to that: we let people vote who aren't registered for anything else.

> In my country (Netherlands), everyone above 18 is registered by default.

I don't know how it is in the Netherlands, but that system would be impractical here because the people here are free to move around (and often do, across voting district lines, state lines, you name it, without a second thought) without informing anyone. There's no central registry of all citizens in the first place, and there's *certainly* no central registry of where everyone lives. Other than the voter registration, there isn't any other registry that could be used for determining where people can vote and whether they've already voted (possibly in a different polling location) and so forth. The thing most people immediately think of to use instead is the Bureau of Motor Vehicles database of licensed drivers, but that would exclude substantial categories of people on unconstitutional grounds.

Note that it does matter very much which voting district people vote in, not just for determining whether someone has already voted in another polling location, but also because you vote on different stuff. For example, school taxes are voted on by the residents of each school district (and while I suspect you don't here anything much about it overseas because of the inherently local nature of it, people at the local level are often more concerned with the outcome of these local elections than with the state and national ones). US Representatives represent not just the people of a specific state but more particularly the people of a specific congressional district within a state, so for voting purposes it matters which district you're in. And so forth.

Among other things, the Board of Elections has to know *where* to expect you to come and vote, so they can have your name on the list for that location. (Having a list of who is going to come and vote, and checking them off, is the only realistic way to enforce the limit of one vote per person, i.e., to prevent ballot-stuffing.) So you have to let them know where you live ahead of time, so they can put you on the list for your precinct. If you move, you're still registered, but you have to update your registration with the new address if you want to vote in the new polling location (and, thus, on the local issues in your new place of residence).

> The only caveat is that you have to be registered with your municipality, which you have to do
> anyhow for various different reasons (municipal tax, getting passports/ID/driving licence ...).

So you can't vote if you don't live in a municipality? That wouldn't go over so well here. Also, while it varies from one municipality to another, most municipal taxes in the US are levied on either income or property ownership (land, specifically), so no, not everyone who lives in a city, town, or village has to register for tax purposes, or any other reason for that matter. There's a census every ten years, but while participation is encouraged (and there's really no downside), it's not actually mandatory, and I think the privacy nuts (ironically, including a lot of the sort of people who read slashdot) would go bonkers and start filing lawsuits if the government tried to make the census mandatory or give it any legal force.

As for the passports, most Americans don't have them. (Before you react too strongly to that, bear in mind that from here I can travel for two thousand miles in any direction, or three thousand miles to the west, without a passport. This is mostly a very good thing, though it would be nice if it were somewhat easier to find people who speak a foreign language fluently.)

As noted above, the driver's license is something whole categori

Re:Voter registration

[Anonymous Coward]

This is a good talking point for women who demand 'equal' rights...
(not saying they shouldn't, just that they seem to be very selective)

Re:Voter registration

[CrimsonAvenger]

So in the US one can just "arrive" somewhere, move in a random house and everything is ok for the Government? They don't need to know where to send your tax letter or anything? Strange.

The reverse sounds strange to me - you can't move around without letting the government know? Sounds nasty to me. I've moved a dozen times or more without bothering to notify anyone but my family. And would find it strange to have to notify anyone.

Re:Voter registration

[Dravik]

There is no national election. There are 50 state elections. Each state has a vote equivalent to its total representation in both houses of Congress. Each state decides how it will allocate those votes (proportionally, winner take all, or some compromise between the two). Whoever wins the votes of the electoral college becomes president.

Competition

[glaeven]

A man carrying a musket rushed at him. Another threw a brick, knocking him off his feet. George Kyle picked himself up and ran. He never did cast his vote. Nor did his brother, who died of his wounds.

I'd like to see Karl Rove top that.

Not exactly true

[codepunk]

The states actually determine who is a eligible voter. Some states deny voting privs to convicted felons, some can vote reguardless even in prison and others can vote if there imposed sentence has been served. Personally I think once a mans
sentence has been served he should be eligible to vote else it imposes (taxation without representation) on the individual.

A great many states have poll day registration you walk in with a utility bill, drivers license or something of that sort and
you can register to vote right then and there.

Re:Not exactly true

[TempySmurf]

Besides the simple moral objections to making someone a half citizen, we can just do the math and see why this is a bad idea. Around 7 million in prison, Kerry lost by 3 million and Gore from even less. Which doesn't include those who got out of prison but can't vote. Simply make laws that target certain demographics and you've got yourself an election. Whether or not this has been done, it's an obvious flaw in the system.

Re:Not exactly true

[forsey]

This is a great point! If you were thrown in jail because you broke a that you morally disagree with, shouldn't you be able to vote against those who brought the law in? Allowing felons to vote seems like a safe guard against corruption to me. It seems like it wouldn't be too hard to make a law to turn a group of people who you didn't want to vote into felons so they couldn't. Make sleeping on a park bench a felony if you want to stop homeless people from voting, for example.

Re:Not exactly true

[Ironchew]

Allowing felons to vote seems like a safe guard against corruption to me. It seems like it wouldn't be too hard to make a law to turn a group of people who you didn't want to vote into felons so they couldn't.

Sounds like the War on Drugs to me.

Re:Not exactly true

[19thNervousBreakdown]

More than 1% of the US voting-age population is in prison. If you count those on parole or probation, you go up to 3.2%. We do have bigger issues.

Re:I voted in this manner...

[Anonymous Coward]

This doesn't make any sense. No one thought to call the state police, FBI or the media?

More importantly, these statements don't add up:

There were no republicans running in our little township

They also explained how important it was to vote democrat

If no republicans are running, then why go to all the effort?

Something smells in your story.

This week it is YOUR turn to vote "no".

[khasim]

So the various Congress Critters would all agree to vote "yes" for pay raises ... except for one who would vote "no".

Then, while campaigning, they can ALL claim to have voted against it.

And so on with every important issue.

Re:Congress

[thetoadwarrior]

Well to be fair the UK's House of Lords is an unelected body that holds no accountability to anyone and they've looked out for the "average Joe" way more than the elected and accountable house of commons.

You'd be surprised how honest people can be when their job doesn't rely on what the average dimwit thinks.

Re:Congress

[rjmx]

You'd be surprised how honest people can be when their job doesn't rely on what the average dimwit thinks.

... which is an excellent argument against electing judges.

Founding fathers

[philspear]

The article makes the interesting point that our founding forefathers considered secret balloting cowardly. Clearly they did not anticipate violence as a tactic to tamper with elections. Our founding forefathers thought it was important to include an amendment stating that you could not be forced to quarter troops against your will in times of peace, clearly not anticipating that it would not really be an issue today. Some of our founding forefathers thought that slavery was alright. Not all of our founding forefathers thought separation of church and state as we take it today was a good idea.

It always strikes me as strange that people take the constitution as more than just a set of generally good ideas and precedents written by talented individuals. People act like because our founding forefathers said X, it was handed down by God himself.

I usually run up against this when the constitution seems to disagree with my liberal leanings (I'm sure someone will want to get into a pointless discussion of the second amendment, but we've all been down that road), but it's not limited to just that, and I'm sure it runs both ways.

More specific to elections though, isn't it about time we abolished the electoral college and go right to a popular vote? There is clearly no legitimate reason for it to still be around. Electors rarely switch their votes, and, as the article points out, the founders saying it's a good idea does not make it so.

Re:Voting the Open-Source Way

[EGSonikku]

Nothing, as long as the state pays for the ID, and provides transportation to get the ID. Otherwise "Voter ID" essentially becomes "Poll Tax" and you have people with little or no income unable to vote because they can't afford an ID or the local DMV is two cities over.

Re:Congress

[thetoadwarrior]

You'd be surprised how honest people can be when their job doesn't rely on what the average dimwit thinks.

... which is an excellent argument against electing judges.

True.

Having 3 equal groups within a government and one that isn't accountable to the uneducated masses works best. It keeps thing balanced.

He did

[copponex]

Isn't the greatest trick the devil ever pulled convincing the world that he didn't exist?

He helped steal an election, out an undercover CIA agent, formulated lies that led our nation to war, may not see one day of jail for it, and can continue to deny that he was involved (of course, not on record). He can now join G. Gordon Liddy, Oliver North, and many others of the faithful party who have broken US and international law, and yet are somehow immune to the legal system.

Re:I voted in this manner...

[bjourne]

Your story appears to be made up. If it isn't, could you please provide more details so that someone could identify who this scumbag mayor is? He should be in jail but may still hold some official position which is why it is important to identify him.

Granted this was only way back in 2000, but I lived in St. Clair County, IL. It was a small township called French Village

According to wikipedia, there is no French Village township in St. Clair County. However, google maps finds a park called French Village in East St. Louis in St. Clair County in Caseyville township.

At 8am, the mayor knocked on my door and informed my wife and I it was time to vote

The mayor in Caseyville at that time seem to have been George Chance. So that is the guy that came knocking on your door 8am 2000-11-07 dragging you out to vote? Didn't you have to work or something?

We marched down to the fire station with him and twenty other poor people

Also fishy. The townships population is 4300, why did he choose you and 20 other people? Also, must have been quite a walk. There's not that many fire departments in Caseyville...

Re:Congress

[jonaskoelker]

The law is the law, and shouldn't be controlled by current community opinions.

How is that not counter to "by the people, for the people"?

If enough fucktards want to change the law, move elsewhere and watch them get their just deserts.

Informed decisions based on public debate that includes experts on subject matter will probably lead to better decisions than the will of the average mob. But the law is the people's, not the elite's.

It's easy us to look down on people. But consider this: there may be smarter people than us who govern us. Would we want to be cut out of the loop because we weren't elite enough?

Re:Voting the Open-Source Way

[Mr. Slippery]

In Indiana (where the voter ID started and ended up with SCOTUS), we have free ID's and transportation if you need it.

Interesting about the transportation, I'd like to see more information about that. Have a link?

The ID itself might be free, but one has to provide copies of various documents to get it. Obtaining these documents can be difficult and expensive. When a mother of seven has to choose between paying bills or spending $50 to get a copy of her out-of-state birth certificate in order to get a "free" voter ID card, there's a problem.

Not everybody even has a birth certificate, you know. I had a housemate who didn't; as I recall, she had to go back to her home state and obtain some affidavits attesting to her existence before she could get a driver's license.

There are really no excuses and no reason to not have to prove who you are.

There are really no excuses for throwing obstacles in the way of people's exercise of the franchise, when the claimed problem of "voter fraud" is non-existent.

You need to take a government class

[Sycraft-fu]

This is one of the problems we have these days, and one of the things that has lead us down this road of abuses of freedom of speech and so on. You, like many others, have this idea that the Constitution is just some document that we should ignore when convenient. Well, that's not how it works. Our legal system is such that the Constitution is the highest law of the land. All other laws must conform to it. It isn't just something to be disregarded when convenient. That's how our legal system works.

So for example if you want the electoral college changed or abolished fair enough, however that requires a constitutional amendment. In case you don't know what that requires, I'll tell you: 66% of both houses of congress need to pass it, then 75% of the states. It isn't easy to amend the Constitution, and that was done on purpose.

Also you might want to learn more about it because you might come to respect it as more useful. Barring a Constitution, any of the crap the Bush administration wanted to pull would be perfectly legal. If federal law was the be all end all, then so long as congress said "ok, it's legal." Now if you are ok with the government just trampling on rights, well then fine. However I don't want to hear bitching when they trample on the first, but silence when they trample on the 2nd.

I can make a compelling public safety and order argument for trampling on/abolishing ANY amendment.

The Constitution isn't just some quaint little document, it is the very foundation of the US government. It is what united the states in to a union, it is what defines the limits of the federal republic we live in (the US is a republic, not a democracy, there's a difference) and so on. It is also the document on which just about every other free nation has based theirs on. So it is something important to understand, especially if you live in the US and are thus subject to it's law. This idea that it is just a quaint piece of paper to be ignored at various times is extremely ignorant.

Re:Congress

[cayenne8]

"Having 3 equal groups within a government and one that isn't accountable to the uneducated masses works best. It keeps thing balanced."

Hmm...too bad then, that here in the US, we switched to allowing the populace to vote for our senators, rather than having them appointed.

Re:Looks Like The "Good Old Days"

[jmichaelg]

Funny. That's not what the labor law websites are saying. For example,

Card Check Process: Section 2 of EFCA would establish a mandatory card-check recognition process under which an employer would be required to recognize a union as its employees' exclusive bargaining representative once the union presents signed authorization cards from a simple majority of the employees in the work unit the union seeks to represent. The card-check process would take the place of NLRB-supervised secret ballot elections currently used to determine whether a majority of employees want union representation.

Perhaps you'd be willing to provide a citation? And while you're at it, who gets to elect whether a secret ballot or open card signature will be the process used?

Re:Congress

[Eskarel]

The creation of the law is "by the people, for the people"(legislative branch), the enforcement of the law is "by the people, for the people"(executive branch), these groups must be elected and for the most part are(we don't vote for everyone who creates or enforces the law, but we do vote for their bosses who are responsible for these activities). Whether that process is working as intended is another question, but it's set up correctly and should in theory provide the appropriate represenation.

The application of the law is not "by the people, for the people", nor can it ever be. The application of the law, is by the law for the law with a smattering of justice thrown in depending on how just the law is in the first place. The people can(in theory) change the law, they can certainly change the people who made it, they can change the people who enforce it, and they can even change the constitution if enough of them want to.

They can't decide how the laws which have been written will be applied(without rewriting them at least), and should not be able to. It is the judiciary's job to decide whether the law is in violation of the constitution, and whether everything has been done according to the law. We have juries to decide facts, but we need independent and ideally impartial judges to decide the law.

We need this because neither the mob, nor the government can be trusted to protect the rights of those it believes guilty of a crime. If either group had complete control of the application of the law then anyone who the public(or government) believed was guilty of a crime would have no protections under the law. No judge who has to face reelection will ever throw out evidence against someone accused of a crime which the public finds particularly heinous because it was illegaly obtained. No judge who has to face reappointment by the government will protect the rights of someone who speaks out against that government.

The law must presume that everyone is innocent until proven guilty, and must protect the rights not only of the innocent, but also the accused, and even the guilty. It must do this because the protection of those rights is what makes the USA what it is, it is, or at least was, the shining light of our society, it's what allows any degree of fairness in our legal system whatsoever, and allows us the freedoms which construct our lives.

The people have the right, and the ability to determine what those rights are, they have the right and the ability to determine both the content and the enforcement of the law, but they cannot control its application, because they cannot(at least as a group) be trusted to treat everyone, even the guilty, as equal before the law.

That doesn't mean that judges are perfect, or that they are always capable of the impartiality which they are charged to uphold, but an educated, reasoned individual has a lot better chance than a mob. If you want to continually reelect/appoint judges then you can kiss you rights goodbye if anyone ever accuses you(guilty or not) of anything which gets the mobs blood boiling.

Re:Oh, its us evil Republicans!

[skam240]

Fun facts:

Republicans supported black suffrage (being targeted by the KKK after the 15th amendment, and had greater support, as a percentage, for the Voting Rights Act of 1965 than democrats)

Republicans fought womans suffrage.

If women could not vote, no democrat would have served as president of the United States in the previous 50 years.

This was a completely different Republican party doing those things then today. If you know your American history then you know that at a few points in our history the major party's ideologies have changed in drastic ways. The Republican party you're referring to has quite a few similarities to our modern Democrats.

The modern Republican party, to which you seem to be trying to bolster the image of with these claims, really only took shape after Southern Democrats (of which the majority of them were given that they wanted nothing to do with those darn Republicans freeing the slaves and giving them the right to vote) left the Democratic party in droves because of their support for the civil rights movement. They merged with Northern economic conservatives and bam, you have the modern Republican party.

Kind of a shady history for the current manifestation of the party if you ask me.