h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

In California, who is a registered voter, and whether they have voted or not is public knowledge. The pollworkers cross your name off a list and make it public every so often during the election. Much ado is made to prove that you are who you say you are before you vote, because once your ballot is in the box, it's anonymous, and in there for good.

I find it alarming that the unitedkingdomese voter isn't anonymous. Someone in government could cross reference your voter number and then go and see just how you voted and wreak retribution! I'd never give my voter number to anyone who didn't absolutely require it.

Lots of people don't give their number to anyone. They probably won't say how they voted either.

What happens in the US if someone votes using someone else's vote?
The crime in the UK is called Personation and does carry quite a stiff penalty. One method of using personation without fear of the real voter turning up is to vote on behalf of a recently dead person whose name still exists on the list.

Having a voter number relating to an individual ballot slip is supposed to be a backstop measure against vote fraud. It doesn't appear actually on the slip. the system works a bit like raffle tickets. You get the voting slip (raffle ticket) but the stub is kept in the book and your voter number is written on that part.

>What happens in the US if someone votes using someone else's vote?<

I don't know! I know if someone can prove that they are who they are and it's marked that someone has voted as them, the County Registrar will?/can? strike the entire ballot box. Since each voter gets a Sample Ballot in the mail, and our mail is considered to be pretty fraud proof, the combination of the Sample Ballot in the possession of the prospective voter, a driver's licence (which has a photo on it) and an address that matches that on the Ballot are pretty good indicators.

When I was a pollworker, the precinct was sufficiently small, and I had been a newspaper deliverer long enough that between me and the others we knew by sight everyone who walked in the door. Each of us belonged to our own party and had peculiar and strongly held ideas, so the idea of colluding to slant what was in the box never was entertained. Impersonation never happened on our watch!



As for dead people voting, many folks will come in and let the pollworker know. Because it's such an unusual thing for anyone to even want to vote, the survivors usually care enough to do something about it. I don't know how common it is in other counties, but in the one where I was working at the time, there has been cases where the county refuses to strike corpses from its list of registered voters for years. It might be more strongly regulated in other regions.

So you haven't ever heard the humorous slogan (in relation to the issue about dead people being on the register) "Vote Early, Vote Often!"

IN the UK we are playing around with a range of voting methods.

Your Guide Entry has just been picked from Peer Review by one of our Scouts, and is now heading off into the Editorial Process, which ends with publication in the Edited Guide. We've therefore moved this Review Conversation out of Peer Review and to the entry itself.

If you'd like to know what happens now, check out the page on 'What Happens after your Entry has been Recommended?' at EditedGuide-Process. We hope this explains everything.

Thanks for contributing to the Edited Guide!

Excellent!

Thank you Sea Change.