US election campaigns, especially for national offices like the presidency and both houses of Congress, are interminably long and absurdly expensive. This is partly a consequence of the fact that the date of the election is fixed (for federal offices they are held every even year on the day after the first Monday in November), which means that planning can be done a long time ahead. Furthermore, the almost complete absence of restrictions on the money that can be raised and spent (whatever flimsy restrictions there are are easily worked around) means that vast sums, billions of dollars, are involved, giving an outsize influence to wealthy individuals and organizations.
People in other countries are incredulous that elections in the US are run by the states and that each state largely makes its own rules, and these rules are determined sometimes by highly partisan state legislatures that seek to give an advantage to their own party. They do this as far as the law and the constitution allows but in the age of creepy Trump, they are sometimes willing to go over the line. In many other countries, elections are run by a central, largely non-partisan, body. The reason for the state variability in the US goes way back to the origins of US that required the 13 colonies that had been separate entities to join together to form a single nation. Since each colony had been operating largely independently of the others, they jealously guarded their autonomy as much as possible and thus gave as little power to the central government as they could. Hence we have this patchwork of systems. One argument in its favor is that it allows for innovation in that each state can be a laboratory to try out different ways of doing things and, hopefully, the ones that works best may be copied by others.
Non-Americans are also incredulous that elections in the US take so long to determine the results, even though computers are used for tabulating the votes. In many other countries, people use what seems on the surface to be a more primitive system, with paper ballots that are hand marked and hand counted and yet the results are usually available by the next morning. The reason for this is that elections in the US are rarely for just one race. They are for elected offices at all levels, from the president, to the Senate, to the House of Representatives, to county officials, city mayors, and to even smaller local bodies like city councils and school boards and judges. In addition, there are also votes to be case on various measures.
For example, my ballot had provisions for one vote to be cast for the presidential ticket, two for a vacant US senate (one for just two months to cover the remainder of the unexpired term of Diane Feinstein who died in office, the other for the subsequent six-year term), one vote for the House of Representatives, one for state senator, one for member of the state assembly, two for members of the governing board of the local community college, one for the mayor of my small town, two for members of the city council, and twelve for various ballot propositions at the state, county, and city level.
As a result, the ballots are very long. In my case, the ballot I got consisted of four pages, each of which was 17 inches long (twice the size of a regular sheet of printer paper) printed on both sides.
California has a system where they mail the ballot to all registered voters. The state also provides detailed information to help you decide how to vote. For example, the ballot I received two weeks ago was accompanied by a 142-page booklet from the state that told you how and where to vote and provided information on the candidates and the issues. The booklet consisted of 21 pages of general voting information, two pages of statements of the senate candidates (that was the only statewide office in play), 5 pages of thumbnail sketches of the propositions on the ballot plus a list of the organizations that support and oppose them, 50 pages of descriptions and analyses of the propositions, and 64 pages of the full text of all the laws behind the propositions, again with the arguments for and against them, for those who want to see the fine print.
In addition, the county I live in sent me my ballot plus another booklet of 35 pages, with eight pages giving general voting information, six consisting of candidate statements, 13 pages about the county and city propositions, and eight pages consisting of a facsimile of the ballot. I used the ballot copy to first fill in my preliminary preferences and then let it sit for a few days to see if my mind changed. Then I filled in the actual ballot (where I had to fill in 23 boxes) signed and sealed the envelope, and dropped it off in the box in my local city hall two days ago. So I am done.
As can be seen, voting in the US is pretty complicated but I have been impressed at the amount of detailed information voters are given (at least in California) to help them make decisions. I am glad that the ballots were mailed to me so that I can sit at home and think about the vote and enter them carefully. Doing so on election day, and filling in the many boxes while standing in a small booth, is liable to introduce errors.
So when it comes to tabulating the results, election workers have a complicated task, much more so than counting the votes for just one race. While I am sure it could be made better, perhaps people in other countries will now have a better idea of why elections in the US are so complicated and take so long.
Thanks for the info.
Mano, you are really conscientious! I’m impressed.
Since our two-party system usually restricts our options in candidates to two, recent events have made voting for offices really easy for me: I’ve become a one-issue-only voter.
Which candidate will preserve (what remains of) democracy, and which one will replace democracy with fascism?
*That* sure makes my choice easier! So, I’ve usually always ended up voting the straight democratic ticket without even looking at the candidates’ names, no matter how loathesome in other aspects they may be.
It’s a good point to make that each voter in the USA actually votes in quite a few different elections on Election Day. The ballot that I just mailed in the state of Massachusetts didn’t have as many things to vote for as Mano’s in California, but it still had about a dozen national, state, and county elections, plus 5 state referendum questions.
The election in Geogia is going smoothly and the result will likely be announced by late night election day or in the morning after.
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Polls and early voting
“The TEC Show”:
‘Trump VS Harris: Shocking Early Results for the 2024 Presidential Election’
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=MpatX4MpO2s
Most of this episode is dedicated to Georgia. The local Harris campaign can feel reasonably confident at this stage.
Truthfully, it surprises me that the ultra-wealthy in America took this long in determining that the best way to keep and increase their wealth was to just buy elections (meaning anything from bribing and buying candidates directly, donating to the PACs working to elect them, all the way to the new extreme of offering huge potential paydays for voting for their preferred candidate, thanks Elon!). Sure, some preparation was required, carefully influencing things behind the scenes to get to a point where a friendly Supreme Court was in power, allowing for Citizens United to be decided so disastrously. But part of me wonders if the plutocratic megalomaniacs of today are truly more morally bankrupt than their predecessors, or if they just dreamed bigger. I suspect it’s mostly the latter.
However, I do think there has been a certain amount of movement in our culture at large towards a sort of amoral nihilism (spurned by the “we’re all screwed, let’s party” attitude that the permacrisis has created). It’s hard to imagine even the GOP of the 70s and 80s being so nakedly consumed with self-interest at the expense of everything else (and the Democrats certainly were not). There was actually a veneer of trying to do the right thing for constituents. Or maybe that’s just a story I’m telling myself. Whatever the case, there is no veneer anymore. If something is not directly in a politician’s perceived self-interest, regardless of their representative political animal being in clade Paenungulata or Euungulata, they will almost certainly not fight for it. They still pretend to be servants of the people, but make no mistake -- they are looking out for #1. And thus the amount of money involved in American elections has increased considerably.
For comparison: I live in Florida. The sum total of election information that has been sent to me is… the sample ballot. It has instructions on where to go to vote in it, but that’s it. And it arrived today. Plenty of time to do a deep dive on these things, right?
We don’t vote on as many positions here in Scotland, but we do vote for multiple levels of government… However, we generally vote for them on different days, as experience shows that having multiple votes (often using different systems) on the same day leads to confusion and decreases turnout. (It helps that the various different levels of government have different electoral cycles.)
Obviously, give the number of electoral positions in the US, you can’t split them all out on different days, but I wonder if perhaps separating state, federal, and local elections might not be a better approach?
Michael Suttkus @ 6
Under the glorious rule of governor DeSantis, the citizens of Florida are not to be disturbed by any noise about ‘elections’ nor are their sensibilities to be challenged by unsuitable books in libraries.
Too bad if you are black and have a name like Abraham Lincoln and find out you have been deleted from the voter registry because some DeSantis appointee mistook you for somebody else (or at least pretends it was a mistake).
@5 VolcanoMan: It’s gone back and forth over the history of the US. To a large extent based on how wealthy the upper class is. Right now the super rich are at historically high levels of wealth and are using it to influence US politics. The current generation seems novel but it’s really because they are more open. There was a generation in 70s-90s of rich that influenced politics but they did it more carefully and covertly.
This older group is the generation that made sure you could lobby congress with nothing but shell company names attached. Make PACs that went around campaign finance limitations and dump unlimited money in without attaching your name to anything. That you could setup networks of charities and think tanks structured to hide where the money is coming from.
What VolcanoMan @5 and JM @6 say is right, and I think that today there might be one more factor.
The republicans know that they can no longer win with just people voting: they can no longer win the popular vote. There’s some statistic about, in every presidential election in the past 32 years, the republican candidate has only won the popular vote once.
Well, not so much a problem due to the undemocratic electoral college. But I think that, with such a turn of republican voters to extreme, extreme, positions (caused by republican politicians/Fox News whipping them up into frenzied fear and anger), the republican party knows that they can’t get into power even by relying on the electoral college anymore. They’ll have to buy more and more elections, or they’ll never get into power again.
And so, I think that if this time they successfully purchase the election, they won’t give up the position, i.e., quit on democracy and just stay autocratically in power, because they’ll never be in power again if they don’t stay there this time.
Just a thought.
@ Dunc #7
How elections happen is also a political issue. In all the jurisdictions I have lived in in California, one of the winning election issues about elections is and has been:
“I don’t wanna have to keep on going to the polls every three months for this or that dinky picayune election or candidate for dogcatcher. It’s costing us too much to hire absolutely everybody for this just one issue. Consolidate the dates so I only have to go once, and pay less taxes.”
It’s on purpose and it’s our will.
@5, VolcanoMan,
Historically it was once much, much worse. Until the 17th Amendment, the elections of senators were entirely at the discretion of the state legislatures. Some states did have public elections to choose senators, in other states the legislatures or governors simply appointed them. That amendment was approved in 1919, just over 100 years ago, and it’s the basis for the idea that state legislators could find election results invalid and choose a different set of electors today. Before 1919, the state legislators were allowed to use any process they wanted to select senators. There was a lot of graft and corruption in the 1870’s to 1900.
But beyond that, the reason primary elections exist in the first place is because prior to primaries, candidates for office were chosen by the leaders of each party. This is the origin of the famous ‘smoke-filled rooms’. Primaries elections were started to give more voice to the public about who would represent them in the general elections. Some state parties still caucus rather than have primaries.
And of course you will find references in O. Henry and other literature of the late nineteenth century and early twenties referring to ward heelers. These individuals were banned from bribing potential voters (that happened early on and was quickly stepped on), but they were given budgets by the political parties to buy drinks for prospective voters, provide meals, throw parties, give gifts of varying value, all for the purpose of convincing the voter to vote for their candidate. At the time it was not yet illegal to withhold these gifts, or drinks, from people who wouldn’t swear they were going to vote for the candidate providing the money for the drinks. That’s what Musk is possibly getting in trouble for right now, if his announced give-away is only to people who will say they will vote for Trump he is violating a bunch of election laws. It may be legal to give money to help them vote, but not to help them vote for a specific candidate.
A lot of the dirty tricks we are seeing have historical precedent in USA elections. There is a story that in the 1848 Presidential election, the Democratic Party’s nominee Lewis Cass lost because a few days prior to the election a rumor circulated that he had fathered a black child. The story about the rumor may have been true, but even if the rumor hadn’t circulated he might have still lost as he didn’t have support of the Democrats of the NE states who joined the Free Soil party in protest of Cass’ nomination. Martin Van Buren spilt the democratic ticket and got 10% of the vote, which was enough to keep Cass from beating Zachery Taylor.
None of this means further reforms are not possible, or necessary, but it was once worse. What is infuriating is that between the Republican party and the US Supreme Court, they appear to want to take us back to those days.
@seachange:
Most countries get around that aspect by saying ‘why the heck is dogcatcher an elected position anyway’? Not to mention the entire idea of electing judges.
Here in Canada Federal, Provincial, and Municipal elections are held on different days, and to some extent must be because if the government falls early (due to, say, being unable to pass a budget) then the election has to be held then, so fixed dates aren’t a thing. That said, for Federal and Provincial elections, the parliamentary system means you’re only voting for one position in either of those.
The only election where multiple people get elected is municipal elections, where you’re normally voting for a mayor, a city councillor, and a school board official. (Here in Ontario you could be voting for one of four different school board official positions, depending on whether your taxes are going to English or French language school boards and the like.)
Some provinces also have the possibility of ballot initiatives and referenda like some states, but that’s not common; frankly the last time I remember that being a big thing at the federal level was when Mulroney tried to pass the Charlottetown Accord via a referendum. (It failed fundamentally because it was asking ten different questions and expecting a single yes/no answer on the full set of them; I suspect if it had been broken down into four or five different chunks and each of them voted on, enough single-issue ‘no’ voters would have been single-issue on different issues that all of the pieces might still have passed. There were parts of it that were very much needed but died with the rest.)
In any case, you’re right in that it’s a political calculus, but a lot of other countries have made a different calculus: when you get right down to it a lot of the complexity and mess of U.S. elections is really rooted in the fact that the U.S. treats a lot of jobs as elected positions which aren’t treated as such in any other industrialized nation.
[jenorafeuer,
You had not closed the italics tag that began with the word ‘then’ in the second paragraph, with the result that everything that followed was italicized. I took the liberty of thinking that you wanted to only italicize that one word, and edited your comment accordingly. If you meant something else, please let me know. -- Mano]
That’s pretty much true for Australia, too, except it was only 6 colonies. But that didn’t stop those colonies agreeing that federal elections should be controlled by federal government law and confirming it in the constitution (the early elections were held by the states until “the [federal] Parliament provides otherwise”, which it did, 4 years after federation).
Federal electoral boundaries and elections themselves are supervised by a federal government Electoral Commission that acts in a non-partisan way, and disputes and irregularities in boundary setting and elections are referred to the Court of Disputed Returns (special sittings of the federal High Court).
Postal and walk-in pre-poll voting is regarded as completely unexceptional, and accounts for a good proportion of the vote (about 18% at the last federal election in 2022).
Australian elections, state and federal, only elect members of parliament, not other functionaries.
@Mano: Yes, that’s what I meant. Thank you.
@prl: Canada also has a non-partisan board to handle deciding riding boundaries and the like, Elections Canada. And while technically they only define the ridings for the federal elections, it’s pretty common for Provincial and Municipal governments to set their own riding and ward boundaries to match the federal ridings to avoid confusion (and to avoid having to do all the work required to figure out good boundaries).
@15 jenorafeuer
Another large difference between Canada and the USA is getting on the voters’ list. I am automatically on the voters’ list at the proper poll. I have no idea how this happens (OHIP, CRA registation?). In years of political campaigning I cannot remember ever having to get a prospective voter on the voters’ list.
Also Elections Canada likes to bulk up the vote. One Federal election, I was hospitalized and, a couple of days before the election, Elections Canada people and volunteers were going room to room to ensure we could do an early vote. We have polling stations in prisons and I have seen a worker at a local homeless shelter issuing certificates of residency (as in the local riding) to allow shelter “residents” to vote. I think we have a totally different philosophy than the USA.
Mano is describing a bizarre voting procedure that likely would put off a large proportion of Canadian voters, especially those with limited literacy or many first generation Canadians whose first language is not English or French.
Every US state has its own rules for voter registration.
In Minnesota, I only registered once when I was old enough to vote way back in 1983.
Ever since then, my voter registration is automatically updated whenever I have changed my address at the Post Office, and voters then receive a postcard that lists their new polling location at their new address.
It’s very easy to vote here, and I do not even need to produce any ID. I just give my name and address, sign the voter list, and am handed my paper ballot to fill out and then feed into the scanner. Easy peasey.