On Aug 30, 9:42 pm, Rich Rostrom wrote:
> Could some knowledgable Digger please enlighten a baffled Yank?
>
> The election was nine days ago.
>
> Yet 14% of the primary votes and 19% of the "two-
> party preferred" votes remain uncounted. How?
> What are these uncounted votes? Absentee or
> other mail ballots?
>
> In U.S. elections, final results have to wait on
> the tally of absentee ballots - vide the recent
> Alaska primary. But there is a deadline for the
> reception of such ballots, and the count of
> them is reported shortly afterwards.
>
> The Australian count is trickling in over days.
> The AEC is updating its totals every 15
> minutes or so; the last update added 0.03%
> to the percent counted. At that rate it will take
> six more days to finish the count. But if 81.6%
> have been counted in 9 days, that's a rate of
> 0.4% per hour. Why has counting slowed down?
>
> Also in the U.S., as long the number of potential
> outstanding ballots exceeds the reported margin
> in an election, the election authority reports it as
> "undecided".
>
> But the Australian Electoral Commission
> has declared results in all but one district,
> despite having up to 24% of the vote not
> counted. How can they do that?
I live in a State where almost the entire
voting electorate, except for maybe a
small percentage in the process of moving,
has the ballot mailed to them at least several
weeks prior to an election. There is an
address on an envelope that comes with
the ballot. I then usually spend about a
week to two weeks to review all of the local
candidates and then I mail in the ballot. There
are also specific places besides the voting
precincts that officially accept ballots up to
a specific time on election day if you do not
trust the mail system to deliver the ballot
on time.
There are also physical voting precincts
where I imagine in theory one could walk
in to vote. The extra length of time to
review and fill out the ballot means that
you can actually review each local
candidate in the process of voting,
and it will nearly destroy the process
of accidentally voting for the wrong
person because you could not
connect the name of some local
candidate with anything you may
have read or seen weeks previously,
during the small amount of time that
you would have to vote, if you were
to simply walk in.
I have never walked into a voting
precinct before in this State to cast
a vote. I am guessing that it is
allowed but I am not entirely sure.
The basic question is this. Is
the overwhelming majority of votes
still cast by vote-by-mail in most
States in the United States today,
or are most people in most States
still generally forced to walk into
their precinct and vote for names,
that they do not recognize on the
spur of the moment, and then
usually end up voting for the
wrong candidate by mistake?
How prevalent is vote-by-mail
in the different States of the U.S.?
Reasonably it would seem to
me that if all Australians had
the ballot mailed to them several
weeks prior to the election, rather
than just a small few who
specifically requested it each time,
then a few of them might get less
communicable diseases, because
someone ended up coughing or
puking in the polling booth on
election day.
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