Reply #57: TO SHED LIGHT ON HOW ELECTIONS ARE RUN IN UK AND AUSTRALIA

[New Earth]

I posted on another board asking people from the UK and Australia how their elections are run, to give us some ideas. They all sounded pretty confident in their process. Here is my question and following are snips of the replies:

Question: What do you vote on? Paper ballot, touchscreen, etc....and are your paper ballots marked with pen, or are they punch card ballots (ran through a machine to be tabulated)? If you use machines, are they publically funded? Do the producers of the machines contribute money to any of the candidates' campaigns?

Does your country use exit polls to keep track of the votes? If so, have they always been reliable, or have there been inaccuracies and problems with them?

Do you have confidence in your electoral system, and do you think most in your country also have confidence?


UK:

In the UK the elections are handled by local councils. We vote on paper. You register on a "register of electors" once a year and when any elections come up you get a polling card. It's marked with your polling station which is open from 7am to 9pm, same everywhere in the country. You go, hand in your card, get checked off against the register, get a ballot paper and mark it in ink with a cross next to who you are voting for, ballots are pre-printed with ALL candidates. You put your ballot in a sealed box. The boxes are collected at the end of the day by local council officials and get counted...they ALL get counted. Counts are monitored, polling stations are monitored. We don't use exit polls...we prefer to actually count all the votes. There is no corporate interference in any aspect of the voting. we don't actually vote for a Prime Minister, we vote for an MP in our particular constituency, and the party with the most MPs in Parliament wins - so in effect we vote for the party. The leader of the party becomes Prime Minister.


Australia:

We vote on paper ballots, with a pencil, marking square boxes with numbers. I'm uncertain whether they're read by computers or people, but i'd assume they're all hand counted. it would be an interesting machine that can read MY handwritten numbers, afterall. perhaps i'm wrong and there are computers that help... but i've never heard of any.

if there are machines, i feel sure they'd be publically owned.

there have never really been any problems with a federal election as far as i remember.

I have more confidence in my electoral system than i would in the american one if i lived there, but i still don't like it much as it is. still, it seems to work somewhat. I think most people think it works fairly well, i seldom hear complaints about it really. except from politically minded friends of mine. .

the system is similar to the british, in that you vote for local federal MP's, for them to take a seat in the house of representatives. I'm not exactly sure what majority a party needs to officially have won.

i've never heard of any exit polls being used anywhere.

if you are eligible to vote, and you don't, and you haven't written in to explain why and gain an exception, there are pretty heavy fines. This is in any election. Local council, state parliament, federal parliament...