this post was submitted on 18 Aug 2023
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I recently moved to a new area and got a card in the mail telling me my polling place. On election day I showed up and found out three districts use that building.
So I asked the volunteer which district I was in. He asked for my address, then said, "I don't know where that is". K thx, buddy. Then he whipped out a 20 year outdated paper map and asked me to find my house. The street wasn't even there! After finally stepping out of line (and some exasperated groans of relief behind me) I did 15 minutes of frantic googling to find my district. Then I had to go to the back of the line and wait again.
I was lucky I had the day off work for all that nonsense. Most people don't have that luxury.
This is why we need to push for universal mail in ballots
In my state we do mail in ballots for everyone and it's great, I can literally take days to look over the measures and people before I have to turn it in.
Yes! I live in California and my ballot comes right to my mailbox. I usually visit a polling center a block away to mail it, but I've also run out of time and stuck it in the mail. You can track if it was received with a ballot tracking system.
Voting is so easy in California. It's almost harder not to vote with this system in place. Like, you'd really have to be against it.
Jesus, so you had the right place all along? That is fucked... We're you able to vote? What did you tell them the second time through?
Usually they have your name on a list, and they check it off.
At our election I just walked to a nearby school which had the voting and waited in a queue for a while (it was unusually slow this time because of some changes in how the voting process went) in the end you hand a person your vote and they cross your name of a list and then they put the vote in a box.
There were three different lists and boxes in the voting room but everyone got mail beforehand that said which list you should go to.
All in all, it went very smoothly.
Also voting districts are only used for statistics and logistic purposes. So the insane practice of gerrymandering doesn't exist.
Uhh what ? That sounds like a lot of people in the same voting building
That is the normal case in Germany. Our small town has about 10 districts and they all use the school, but spread over different rooms in different parts of the building. Your invitation contains your district number and there's ample pointer where to find which district. And in case you lost your invitation and have no idea about your district, we can always look you up in the voter list, which contains all adult residents.
I take it your districts are bigger than several hundred people? In bigger cities we use several buildings, but any voting place should still be able to direct you to the right district. In case the local volunteers are unsure, they can always call the voting office, which contains the guys that planned everything and they clear things up, but that's rarely necessary.
There might have been a misunderstanding. I understood "district" as in congressional districts as that's usually what it means in the context of US election. Here in France we also have several "voting desks" (bureau de vote) in the same building, but I didn't know these were also called districts in English