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The root cause of a lot of this is how complex ballots are in American elections. For comparison, this is what a ballot looks like in a Canadian federal electio
by a-priori 10y ago
The root cause of a lot of this is how complex ballots are in American elections. For comparison, this is what a ballot looks like in a Canadian federal election:
http://www.capyouthvote.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/ballot.jpg http://www.capyouthvote.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/ballo...
The reason ours are simpler is because the elections are simpler: we just elect our local member of parliament. At the federal and provincial levels, that's the only decision to make in an election. We don't vote for senators or judges or any other offices at these levels. Instead, these are appointed by parliament.
The municipal elections have the most options because there we elect mayors, city councillors and school board trustees. But they're still just paper "put an X next to the name" ballots that are manually counted.
- Asooka 10y agoEven if you have 10 candidates, how hard is it to just list them on a sheet of paper with a nice big box to draw an X in next to each. The computer can then just scan the boxes and see which one has a big X in it.
- LeChuck 10y agoSeems to work fine here in the Netherlands, and we have a bit more than ten candidates. http://i.imgur.com/pdW1ZTe.jpg http://i.imgur.com/pdW1ZTe.jpg
- koenigdavidmj 10y agoThe federal portion is pretty small in an American election too, three races at most. President every four years, one congressman every two years, one senator at a time (six year terms, but they are staggered so a state's senators get elected in different cycles). At the federal level, we don't vote for judges or referenda or anything like that. On the other hand, my state is vote by mail, so no tricky machines. Just drawing a line to complete an arrow, then mailing it back in. Pretty hard to screw up.