Couldn’t organise a root in a brothel
It amazes me how badly elections seem to be run in the US. We’ve seen the dramas in 2000 and 2004, now we read of people waiting for up to 6 hours to do pre-poll voting. Why does this happen? Its not like they’ve never had elections before and don’t know what to expect, or haven’t made mistakes before from which to learn. So why does it seem that voting is made to be as difficult as possible ….so people appreciate it more, or something like that?
I can’t recall ever having to wait more than about 15 minutes to vote here in Australia, and more often than not its straight in, vote and out in less than 5 minutes. Why can’t the world’s (so-called) greatest democracy get it right, and organise elections properly? It can’t be that hard! Making people wait for hours, running out of ballot papers, having voting machines not working properly is really 3rd world tinpot republic stuff.
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Tell me about it! Luckily I live in a state that allows early voting now, and you I took advantage of this. But it still took me 40 minutes to get through the process. It will only be worse tomorrow.
It’s because voting is not compulsory in the USA. So their typical voter turnout is 30-40%. Last time people were amazed that there was more than 50% voting.
It works so well in Australia because we know everyone’s going to turn up (well 98-99% of registered voters) so we prepare. Why would the Yanks bother setting up so many polling places for only 30% of those elegible?
Their system doesn’t seem very democratic from an Australian perspective where the pollies are always claiming a mandate. The US has a first past the post system so, if there’s a couple of 3rd party candidates, the winner might get only 40% of the votes cast by that 30% of the elegible population – hardly a mandate for anything.
I think Australian elections are SO much better than American ones.
We were lucky though. We voted the first day (of early elections) and the wait was only about ten minutes.
One of the problems is voters are going to the polls early. This is not very common in most areas. Election day is tomorrow, and this election has shown more evidence of blatant fraud that any in history. Some districts have over 100% of the people registered.
Your country has never had to deal with such an abundance of obvious fraud where tens of thousands of potential fraudulent registrations were brought in at the last minute to participate.
I believe you are pontificating with only part of the information at hand.
Hi. How are you? It’s nice to read your blog. Keep on working on it. So, I drop EC for you. Don’t forget to Keep on Smiling. Salaam.
Meh, try going to a polling station in Tasmania while they try and work out the complexities of me having the same name as my dad – I’d kill for a six hour wait!
You know, Brazil is 3rd world (yet) but there never was an error on their voting machines. Especially now that they’re running on Linux.
I think it might also have to do with having a Tuesday election. I have no idea how people would find the time to vote, even if they wanted to. Seriously folks, they need to change it to Saturday – there are some traditions that are just stupid and need to be re-thought!