A week from tomorrow, we have elections. Wow. It's the municipal one, where we vote for who rules our fair city, and it is a bastion of christian conservative enclaves. oooooo...... with pockets of opposition, there are five parties involved.
A municipal campaign lasts about six weeks, and is 'fought' out in newspapers, and via placards and posters. Mostly. You don't really hear much, and the slogans on the posters are 'empty promises'. No one gets too excited about them.
And after all the spectacle of the past two years of watching the US ones... I feel cheated. No robo calls. No polling calls. No one ever calls me, and if I get an IFES questionnaire call once every six months asking about my buying preferences, or whether I feel safe in my neighbourhood, it's actually a welcome diversion in a rather dull day.
So here is how we do it: you don't have to register. You ARE registered as soon as you are of voting age, or become a citizen. I have never seen the inside of a voter registration office, but they know me. I can move, I can move to another state, but they always know where I am. And that is because, if you move, you have to go to the neighboorhood office of the part of the city you live in and register your residence. Which gets passed on to the election board, which updates you on the voting rolls. Easy.
If you want to, you CAN register with a party affiliation of your choice, but I've never done so. For that, you have to get directly involved and do party work, and then you are a known affiliate of that party. I've always preferred to remain independent, and take my voting right seriously, weigh all the sides, and vote as I think is right.
Some people would think it is creepy to register your residence, but on the other hand, some criminals get caught that way. Or used to be...
Fourteen days ago I received my notice in the mail. It was just a slip of paper telling me when the election was, where to go to vote, and what the opening times were. This you present when you go to the polling place assignated.
In the city, such as mine, they are in public schools, and where I go, there are four stations, so you go to the one on the slip of paper. It's simple.
Once there, you might have to wait for a couple of minutes if there is much interest in the vote. There might be five people ahead of you.
But mostly not. There is a table with stern looking poll officials from all the parties presiding over the procedure with lists of the people who will be coming in.
You present your slip of paper and your passport or national identity card as proof you are who you say you are. And I know that will throw some people off balance when I say that. But it was never unreasonable to ask for one, having one was always a fact of life and a necessity, because, you see, most of the EU countries are small, geographically and until the EU became the EU, those documents were necessary to go from one place to another.
For instance, you wanted to go to that super fish restaurant of an evening in Maribor, Slovenia, then Yugoslavia, only an hour's drive away? Well, you had to have ID to cross the border, for instance.
Therefore, having the one or the other used to be a necessity, and had absolutely nothing to do with the voting process, but was just a check on proving you were the person on the list. We've never had a problem with it, because the documents were always a necessary evil.
Whatever, you show them the document, you get your ballot, and they are fairly clear cut and easy, because it used to be, you voted for a party and they delegated your votes and assigned who got positions. Meanwhile, you directly vote for whoever you want on the city council, for instance, can split your ticket however you want, and can write in candidates if you so please.
So it's not rocket science, and done in a minute or so.
And you seal it in an envelope, dump it in a box, and the commission is responsible for the counting. Also simple.
The national turnout used to be really high... up to 80%. It hasn't been that in a long while. People got cynical.
I used to go ballistic when US ambassadors would inject themselves into the discussions and said they would 'teach us about democracy'. Reallah... really?
The polls close around four pm. By six, seven at the latest, results are known, but the country is small.
There was one nugget on the news last week during the long discussion on msnbc about voter supression regarding someone having been in Vienna, and got laughed at for propagating the US system of voting. And it was a conference where they decided that if the US sends people to oversee fair voting in third world countries, they would send delegations to oversee elections in the US, because things weren't kosher. The commission members got kicked out of five states. Says a lot. And they had no reason to be insulted... they insult us all the time... That was in a former election, but should have been done in this one.
The US has national data bases for every damned thing you can think of. You would THINK that they would register all eligible citizens in that, and there wouldn't be the individual state nightmares that are the result of bigotry and resentment, that the impediments are incredible in the eyes of the world, but they do muddle on, don't they. Broken system.
And as Peter always says... 'that's the different'.
A municipal campaign lasts about six weeks, and is 'fought' out in newspapers, and via placards and posters. Mostly. You don't really hear much, and the slogans on the posters are 'empty promises'. No one gets too excited about them.
And after all the spectacle of the past two years of watching the US ones... I feel cheated. No robo calls. No polling calls. No one ever calls me, and if I get an IFES questionnaire call once every six months asking about my buying preferences, or whether I feel safe in my neighbourhood, it's actually a welcome diversion in a rather dull day.
So here is how we do it: you don't have to register. You ARE registered as soon as you are of voting age, or become a citizen. I have never seen the inside of a voter registration office, but they know me. I can move, I can move to another state, but they always know where I am. And that is because, if you move, you have to go to the neighboorhood office of the part of the city you live in and register your residence. Which gets passed on to the election board, which updates you on the voting rolls. Easy.
If you want to, you CAN register with a party affiliation of your choice, but I've never done so. For that, you have to get directly involved and do party work, and then you are a known affiliate of that party. I've always preferred to remain independent, and take my voting right seriously, weigh all the sides, and vote as I think is right.
Some people would think it is creepy to register your residence, but on the other hand, some criminals get caught that way. Or used to be...
Fourteen days ago I received my notice in the mail. It was just a slip of paper telling me when the election was, where to go to vote, and what the opening times were. This you present when you go to the polling place assignated.
In the city, such as mine, they are in public schools, and where I go, there are four stations, so you go to the one on the slip of paper. It's simple.
Once there, you might have to wait for a couple of minutes if there is much interest in the vote. There might be five people ahead of you.
But mostly not. There is a table with stern looking poll officials from all the parties presiding over the procedure with lists of the people who will be coming in.
You present your slip of paper and your passport or national identity card as proof you are who you say you are. And I know that will throw some people off balance when I say that. But it was never unreasonable to ask for one, having one was always a fact of life and a necessity, because, you see, most of the EU countries are small, geographically and until the EU became the EU, those documents were necessary to go from one place to another.
For instance, you wanted to go to that super fish restaurant of an evening in Maribor, Slovenia, then Yugoslavia, only an hour's drive away? Well, you had to have ID to cross the border, for instance.
Therefore, having the one or the other used to be a necessity, and had absolutely nothing to do with the voting process, but was just a check on proving you were the person on the list. We've never had a problem with it, because the documents were always a necessary evil.
Whatever, you show them the document, you get your ballot, and they are fairly clear cut and easy, because it used to be, you voted for a party and they delegated your votes and assigned who got positions. Meanwhile, you directly vote for whoever you want on the city council, for instance, can split your ticket however you want, and can write in candidates if you so please.
So it's not rocket science, and done in a minute or so.
And you seal it in an envelope, dump it in a box, and the commission is responsible for the counting. Also simple.
The national turnout used to be really high... up to 80%. It hasn't been that in a long while. People got cynical.
I used to go ballistic when US ambassadors would inject themselves into the discussions and said they would 'teach us about democracy'. Reallah... really?
The polls close around four pm. By six, seven at the latest, results are known, but the country is small.
There was one nugget on the news last week during the long discussion on msnbc about voter supression regarding someone having been in Vienna, and got laughed at for propagating the US system of voting. And it was a conference where they decided that if the US sends people to oversee fair voting in third world countries, they would send delegations to oversee elections in the US, because things weren't kosher. The commission members got kicked out of five states. Says a lot. And they had no reason to be insulted... they insult us all the time... That was in a former election, but should have been done in this one.
The US has national data bases for every damned thing you can think of. You would THINK that they would register all eligible citizens in that, and there wouldn't be the individual state nightmares that are the result of bigotry and resentment, that the impediments are incredible in the eyes of the world, but they do muddle on, don't they. Broken system.
And as Peter always says... 'that's the different'.
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