US election - technicalities

When I'm posting this, it looks pretty clear that Trump has won. On this thread, I'm not looking at the whys and wherefores of his victory, but some of the technicalities present in any US Presidential election.

The first is that there's not one election, but rather that there are 50 or more separate elections, with each State setting its own rules for counting, maintenance of rolls, general polling booth rules and so forth. I can understand that for purely State elections, but would have expected that for Federal elections the rules would have been uniform in each State and Territory.

Have I misread the position? If I'm right is there any suggestion that there be uniformity?

Comments

  • RuthRuth Shipmate
    There is no such suggestion.
  • Gee DGee D Shipmate
    Thanks
  • @Gee D It's actually more complicated than 50 separate elections. Every county within the states runs voting for federal, state, and local within the county in its own way and with its own board of elections. States can and do set standards for how the counties run elections, and the standardization within states has increased since the 2000 elections when the confusion of different ballot designs (and voting methods: with a pen, by punching a hole in the ballot, with a mechanical machine, with an electronic machine, etc.) across counties (especially in Florida) became infamous. A lot of the counties in the US and states as a whole have switched their in-person voting method to using a pen on paper and then counting the vote by scanning it with a machine (and keeping the ballots to count by hand if necessary). Some states have switched to largely voting by mail for most voters. But there is still quite a bit of variation across counties within states both in how elections are run and in the type of local officials who run them.

    In many places, boards of elections are led by nonpartisan public servants devoted to the integrity of the vote. But in others, people who believe in voting fraud conspiracies or who reject the results of the 2020 election have worked their way into these positions (or, if not in the local board of elections, into the state board of elections or into local government positions that are supposed to certify the results of an election similar to the way that a monarch gives royal assent but that now are threatening to not certify an election unless they think it was "done fairly"). If the results of this year's election had been different, there might have been some chaos not just from citizen conspiracy theorists protesting/threatening the counting of the vote, but by local officials themselves. The courts would have been still likely to make sure that elections results are honored anyway, but not soon enough to prevent sowing doubt and delaying the result enough to prevent the electoral college from functioning and Congress from certifying the results.
  • Gee D wrote: »
    When I'm posting this, it looks pretty clear that Trump has won. On this thread, I'm not looking at the whys and wherefores of his victory, but some of the technicalities present in any US Presidential election.

    The first is that there's not one election, but rather that there are 50 or more separate elections, with each State setting its own rules for counting, maintenance of rolls, general polling booth rules and so forth. I can understand that for purely State elections, but would have expected that for Federal elections the rules would have been uniform in each State and Territory.

    Have I misread the position? If I'm right is there any suggestion that there be uniformity?
    Really? We’re dealing with the terrible reality of this morning and with serious anxiety for the future, and you’d like us to take a moment and explain the technicalities of election procedures and of our federal system here—technicalities that have been explained countless times on the Ship over the years?

    Try Google.


  • Gee D wrote: »
    When I'm posting this, it looks pretty clear that Trump has won. On this thread, I'm not looking at the whys and wherefores of his victory, but some of the technicalities present in any US Presidential election.

    The first is that there's not one election, but rather that there are 50 or more separate elections, with each State setting its own rules for counting, maintenance of rolls, general polling booth rules and so forth. I can understand that for purely State elections, but would have expected that for Federal elections the rules would have been uniform in each State and Territory.

    Have I misread the position? If I'm right is there any suggestion that there be uniformity?

    You're mostly correct. There are some rules of uniformity. States can't racially discriminate on their voting rolls (Fifteenth Amendment). They can't restrict voting by gender (Nineteenth Amendment). They can't impose poll taxes* (Twenty-Fourth Amendment). They can't have a minimum voting age higher than 18 years old (Twenty-Sixth Amendment). The boundaries of federal House districts and state legislative districts have to be drawn in such a way that they contain roughly equal population (Wesbury v. Sanders and Reynolds v. Sims). Article I, § 4, cl. 1 of the U.S. Constitution gives the federal Congress the power to over-ride state election regulations, stating:
    The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations, except as to the Places of chusing Senators.

    To the best of my knowledge aside from various laws enforcing the aforementioned Constitutional limitations Congress has only used this power to make a uniform date for federal elections (the first Tuesday following the first Monday in November) and to require states to offer voter registration to any eligible citizens who apply for or renews a driver's license (the Motor Voter Act). There may be other federal regulations I'm not aware of. It's not my field of expertise.


    *Cross-Pond translation: In the U.S. a poll tax is a tax or other financial payment required to cast a ballot, unlike in the U.K. where the term usually refers to per capita taxation.
  • RuthRuth Shipmate
    Yeah, that was my thought. Or read the US Constitution. Nice annotated version here: https://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/
  • Gee DGee D Shipmate
    Thanks to all who have dealt with the substance of what I was asking
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