Yesterday I had the opportunity to experience the American Presidential Primary Elections from very close by. Very close, since one of the approx. 50 polling stations in Berkeley was located in my house. In the living room, to be exact. (If you look close, you can see the Alpha Chi Sigma mark on the porch steps and on banners in the living room.) Since the number of voters wasn’t that high, I had plenty of time to talk to the volunteers in charge of the polling process (‘poll workers’) and took a look for myself at the polling equipment and procedures. Of course I also did my part in maintaining order and efficiency (I brought them coffee) and when the polling station closed, I joined my housemates for long hours of watching voting outcomes on television. Let me share with you some of the peculiarities that I came across.
One of the first things I noticed at our polling station was the special box designated for ‘provisional’ votes. This box embodies a complicated set of regulations (barriers, if you ask me) for the polling process. First, voters have to register in order to be able to cast their vote [i]. This can be problematic since registration is state-based; therefore you have to vote in the state where you have been registered. While it might be just a minor inconvenience (for a large group of people; estimated around 20% of votes cast in California were sent in by mail), yesterday’s election showed another disadvantage of the system: time-lag. Voting by mail was opened weeks earlier than voting at the polling station. This had a great impact on California: 10% of Democratic votes were cast on John Edwards, a candidate who stepped out of the race days before Election Day.
Of course there are always people who forget to mail in their votes. Add to that the number of people who failed to show a valid identification at the polling station, the people who registered just before the deadline and those who for another reason did not show up on the list of eligible voters. In all those instances, people were allowed to vote, but their ballot was put in the provisional box. By estimation of the poll workers, about 50% of votes cast that day, disappeared in that box. I think I can easily state that, together with the great turnout, these regulations lay at the core of the problems that polling stations faced yesterday: on Stanford campus, there were huge lines of people waiting as the polling station ran out of ballots; we had people knocking on the door hours after ‘our station’ had been closed who thought to have finally found a place where they could vote; and of course it takes a lot of work to thoroughly check the great number of provisional votes.
Another thing that I didn’t know about before yesterday was that every state adds to the ballot a number of state-specific propositions for people to vote on. Effectively, together with picking their favorite presidential candidate, voting day featured several hundreds of referenda nationwide. In California these propositions concerned topics ranging from allowing native Americans to open new casino’s (56% voted YES) to reducing the funding of community colleges (58% voted NO).
A third peculiarity that I want to merely touch upon is the voting system’s decentralization. As we already saw in Iowa, there is – first – a distinction between states that have primaries and those that have caucuses. A second distinction is that between states which hold Democratic or Republican elections, or both. Then there are states with a winner-takes-all system and those without, states with binding elections and those without, states which allow for Democrats to vote for Republican candidates (and vice versa) and states who do not.
One last thing we should keep in mind: it’s not the total number of votes that count. What matters is the number of counties won. The number of counties won, determine the number of delegates that a candidate has ‘won’. I’ve put the word won between apostrophes, as only some of every state’s delegates will be voting for the candidate that the people voted for. A number of delegates – called superdelegates – have the opportunity to decide for themselves who to vote for. As these superdelegates make up approx. 20% of all delegates (796 out of a total of 4049), it is not an easy job to predict the outcome just yet [ii].
I can however, give you the results of the Democratic votes cast in our house. Barack Obama: 140; Hillary Rodham Clinton: 70 (and approx. another 200 unidentified votes in the provisional box). Altogether a 2-1 victory for Obama and a pretty accurate opposite of the state-wide results. I guess Berkeley is a little different...
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[i] Although I won’t go into it much further, it is important to know that registration excludes from voting all Americans who a) are in jail or serving parole (approx. 2.3% of the population and 10% of all young African-Americans men); b) in many states, that have been convicted and served time for specific felonies (an estimated total of 5.3 million potential voters); c) that have been found to be mentally incapable to vote by a court of law. See, for more information here and here.
[ii] For an extensive list, look here.
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