We often hear about the difficulties some people have voting. I'm lucky and I laugh at how easy it is for me, but I'm lucky, I live in a wealthy suburb. Our community is approx. 10K people, the village is about 3 1/2 miles by 1 mile in size yet we have three polling stations. I've been a citizen since 2008 and have never had to wait more than about 10-15 mins even at peak time to cast my ballot. Just wondered what other peoples experience is.
It's always pain free here. I could wish for more stations but only because the drive is usually longer that the wait in line. As for any difficulty in actually casting a ballot, I mean I'm no super genius but I've never had the slightest difficulty.
Not to flounder, and let me know if I cross a line, but around here it is almost pointless voting for the big offices. Guess which way UT is gonna go... but local offices are the important part. Lots of local nonsense to battle and lots of nepotism because I'm voting for Johnson, I've always voted for Johnson and my parents voted for Johnson sr.
Go vote.
Super easy, never had a problem or a line. But I live in a similar area to you, 14k residents in a wealthy suburb of a bigger city.
No huge lines here in my community of 20,000, with traditionally outstanding voter turnout.
I do miss the old voting machines though. Paper ballots are for Bob Costas.
At my old place we voted at the township hall that was the third nearest building to my house, just across the section about 3/4 of a mile. The whole county only had 5k people in it, so I think the township roster was only a hundred names or so.
My current place we have to drive the 3 miles into town to vote at the fire department community room. It's a lot busier, probably 900 people or so, but they have half a dozen booths set up so it generally takes longer for the two old ladies to find your name on their rosters than anything else.
Woody makes a good point. What kind of voting machines do people have? Ours are paper ballots.
And Barefootskater, I assume you were joking when you said you weren't a genius but managed to vote, I was just talking about the difficulty people had in getting to polling stations and waiting to vote.
Polling site is local elementary school about 1/2 a mile from my house. I've never waited longer than 2 minutes to use the machine.
Likewise frustrated by the pointlessness of votes at the top of the ballot. The EC is a horrible system IMO.
In reply to Adrian_Thompson :
Let's clear one thing up;
what I said was I'm not a SUPER genius.
In reply to Adrian_Thompson :
Our voting machines are fully electronic but slightly predate touch screens so they use a spinning dial to select your choice and then push to choose. It feels like an early Audi nav system.
Super easy. Elementary school maybe 4 miles from my house. Low local population density. Never waited in a line the fifteen or so years I've lived here.
Paper ballots. Used to be the ones that you punched out, but the hanging chads ruined that. Lately, it's been fill in the circle with an ink pen.
We're in a mixed, but generally middle-class neighborhood, and the polling place is in a school 2-blocks down the street. We've only lived here a few years, but never have there been more than 3 or 4 people ahead of us. We usually go late-morning, which I'm sure helps too. Today there was no one else there when we arrived around 9:30.
They use paper ballots with electronic scanners here.
Where I live now, the polls are at a gym / activity center at the local park about a mile away. If I try showing up early in the morning, I'm usually in and out in less than 15 minutes. Trying to show up at half an hour before closing time * and the wait can be an hour, give or take. Voting has been on a touch-screen contraption that looks like an industrial tablet, but they're supposed to be bringing out some sort of new voting machine this year that has a paper back-up. I'm not sure how those will work.
Middle class suburb on the southern border of Chicago. Never been shanked. We walk to the polling place, which is a VFW. on the other side of the tracks. About 8 machines, but we always choose the paper ballots.
All of Washington State is vote by mail. Coming from Florida in the hanging chad days, I much prefer this everyone is an absentee system.
We use touchscreen electronic voting machines that generate a paper ballot that you then take over to a vote tallying machine operated by an attendant. Ohio is weird.
Oregon has been vote by mail since 98.
Before that I had to go to an old folks home and stand in line for at least an hour.
I live in a small city of about 33,000 in 9 sq miles. Maybe 70% Caucasian and 10% each African-American, Asian, and Hispanic / Latino.
We have numerous polling places around town. I can think of 3 within 2 miles of my house.
We use electronic voting machines where you push buttons that are identified by a big printed key sheet listing all the ballots. These are inserted as part of the machine prep, not individually.
I've never had to wait more than 15 minutes to vote.
[EDIT] Once you're in the booth (there are usually 3-4), it takes about 2 minutes to actually vote, assuming you know your choices ahead of time.
I'm in a suburb of a major (ish) city. My local polling station is at the local grocery store about a mile or so away. I've never had to wait in line for more than a couple of minutes, but probably wasn't hitting it at peak times. Our are the touchscreen ones with the cassette thing the polling person has to put in the machine first.
-Rob
I voted with an absentee ballot and dropped it off a few days before.
LA figured it was grand idea to go with a mostly untested new electronic system that allows you to vote anywhere in LA county... and because it's so easy... they cut out 80% of the polling places... system did not work as advertised... mayhem ensued... because LA...
They will be mailing ballots to every voter for November (they seem a weeeee bit lacking in confidence in the new system).
(very much thankfully, I don't live in LA county)
I live in a suburb of Nashville. Population 20k in my Precinct. We have 4 ES&S expressvote machines at the local church. For off-year and midterm elections typically takes about 15-30 minutes to vote if there are a dozen people in line. I could see it taking all day if there was a high turnout. I typically early vote in the presidential elections, and waited about 60 minutes at the local library to early vote in '16.
According to the 2010 census, 9950 people live in my little part of suburbia. Mostly white, blue-collar. Voting has never been an issue. Rarely is there a line of more than 1 or 2 people ahead of me. Three voting booths. Despite spending most of the last two years 350+ miles away, I have voted every year. The poling facility itself is a secondary building that is part of the local fire dept.
I live in rural Kentucky and voting here is done by district, separated by city and county (two different governments)
My polling station is about a third of a mile from my house, and it's plainly within sight. It's a little white vinyl sided church. Never had to stand in line at all to vote. Walk in, old lady finds my name in the register, I fill out a paper ballot, kind of like a Scantron, and feed it into the machine.
I get an I Voted ✓ sticker that I usually give to one of my kids.
In reply to rob_lewis :
Wow, Grocery store, I thought all polling stations were public buildings. You learn something new.
P.S. We now have same day voter registration and no reason absentee ballots. I was planning on voting absentee in November, but Michigan have already stated there may be a delay in counting all the expected absentee ballots so I'll make sure to vote in person instead.
Our polling station is in a local church gym. The longest I've ever waited is probably 20 minutes. The machines are touch screen and are as simple as they can be.
Vote by mail. I live in California and have absolutely no confidence at all in the voting process here since they instituted ballot harvesting. LA used the same people for their voting system that set up the Obamacare website. I think the guy's name is Crashy McCrashington.
Parents had a polling place in their garage one year.
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