I have an assigned voting location, but there are several in my district that are all “valid”, and I was just assigned the one closest to my house. If I were to be confused and go to a valid location I wasn’t assigned to, I’m still in the ledger. Since I’m attempting to vote in the correct district, they don’t really have grounds to turn me away.
If I were in the wrong district, I’m still allowed to cast a provisional ballot, which lets you vote but they sort it out later.
You can also vote absentee and then also in person and not disclose that you need to invalidate the absent vote. Here that’s automatic, but in some places it’s a crime.
You’re also allowed to go to a clerks office, which has the equipment to print any ballot and handle it correctly.
Sequentialsilence@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
Where I am there’s simply too many people to have a single location, so there are 4 different locations you can vote at in the district.
themoonisacheese@sh.itjust.works 4 weeks ago
I mean, yes here too, but we’re still assigned a specific place. My voting location is booth 6 at my local primary school, and someone else in my city might get one of the booths at their closest location despite both of us being in the same district.
Even at that primary school, I’m only on the ledger at booth 6, if I tried voting at booth 5 they wouldn’t let me (though they would point me to the booth right next to them of course)
Sequentialsilence@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
Oh, we’re not that organized. The only thing that they really do is require some form of government ID. They don’t really care what they just need to identify you.
They don’t check if you’re allowed to vote, or if you’ve already voted before you vote, as those machines aren’t connected to the internet, so there’s no database to check against. It is checked after the fact when they start counting as the counting machines are connected to the internet.
We had an issue about a decade ago where they were able to hack voting machines on election day, ever since then voting machines aren’t allowed to be connected to the internet.
themoonisacheese@sh.itjust.works 4 weeks ago
I mean, not connecting machines to the internet is entirely reasonable (though in my opinion having them at all is insane).
That’s really interesting though, because your model creates a system where fraud can exist but can be checked (and thus it will, not doing it would be insane), whereas ours removes the problem entirely. I know that you personally don’t have the power to change it, of courses I’m just fascinated by the ways society manages to create deeply flawed systems and prop them up like we can’t do any better.