voting performance
On November 15th they’ll have local Elections in the UK. The voting stations, normally schools, close for their normal purpose and are staffed with people to help the voters make their vote.
After work I’ll walk along to the local primary school “Alfred Sutton” walk up to a table that’s labelled with “H” for House, give them my voter card and they’ll use a pencil to cross my name of a paper list and point me to a little booth where I’ll go and put an ‘X’ next to the name of the person I want to vote for.
It’s all very quaint and has been the same since I started voting in the early 80′s.
Friends in Washington State (West coast USA) get to vote by dropping their papers in a large Ballot Box or the mail, it’s all postal vote for them. In this case, the family made a trip to the ballot box location and the children ceremoniously dropped their vote into the Ballot box.
They can also pick-up a report card that gives them a voting performance score based on their personal voting history and that of thier neighbourhood. Excellent!
November 7th, 2012
Ha, I have voted since I was 18… I must be better than excellent! Of course, you already knew that!
Check out my last post with John Donne’s writings about prayer, it’s a good post since it is mostly John Donne with photos of a church in England (which were taken by my husband!)
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November 7th, 2012
Wouldn’t advise taking your camera inside on the 15th, though.
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p-g, you guessed my plan, I want a picture of the little black ballot bos with my paper filted up and going in. I’ll ask permission first. But in the secrecy of the booth I might sneak a picture of the paper – before I put my ‘X’ on it of course. Wouldn’t want people to think I was roviding proof of who I voted for – but with photoshop (or even Paint) I could mock something up …
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November 7th, 2012
The voting method in the US varies by jurisdiction.
In Texas, I vote by filling in the box by the candidate’s name with a pen so a machine can optically scan the ballot. To me, that seems more like taking a test.
When I lived in Michigan, I voted in a voting booth. Pull the big handle to close the curtain, flip the lever next to the candidate’s name, push the big handle to record the vote, clear the levers, and open the curtain. That seems more like “real” voting to me.
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von lx, closing curtains, pulling levers does all sound a bit fabulous.
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I rather like the sound of the Michigan system! Of course, what I mainly envy is having as much say in the government at every level; US governments have always seemed a great deal more democratic and accountable to their electorate than British ones, thanks to elected officials and state/local Initiative systems. Indeed, there has only been a single vote on a question, rather than a political office, since I became eligible to vote in 1998! (I have made a point of voting at every opportunity since then – though the electoral system here renders the vote meaningless in almost every case, this being a “safe” third-party seat with no influence which Prime Minister or Cabinet we end up with.)
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November 8th, 2012
Don’t like to think of you making the camera lie. Who can we trust these days?
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