Quote Originally Posted by Korrigan View Post
If I can allow me to put the focus back to the primary subject (which was, I think, electoral system)...

I'd like to give you a hint of how things are done in my small country...

In Belgium, voting is not a right, it's a duty. Every person over 18 y.o. has to go voting, not to vote being a crime. Each voter gets a summoning around 1 month before the election day telling you where you have to vote. On the D-Day (which is ALWAYS a sunday, so that fewer people are working) you go to the voting place (primary schools - always), give your ID to the official (BTW what's that about picture ID and non-picture ID - we all have the same ID, here) who marks your name in the list, then you receive your ballot paper - which is free from all personal marks - and vote.

Any ballot paper bearing personal marks such as name, adress,... is disqualified and counts as a blank vote (you have to go voting but can decide to vote for no one, here).

Political system here is fully representative (there is no "winner takes all", representation is proportional). We have 4 major parties (socialist -means left wing but not communist-, liberal -means right wing, not progressist-, ecologist and catholic -called humanist now, cause they want to free from religious references) and a lot of others who don't get more than 2% of the votes. Parties must then negociate and form coalitions to have a majority.

I'll pass on language-related issues, our country having three official languages (french, dutch and german), but the northern part (dutch speaking) and the southern part (french and german-speaking) have different parties - 4 to the south and 5 to the north (they have a major extreme-right party there).

The system is far from perfect, but it kinda works...

We are coming back from electronic voting. We bought it cause politicians told us it was safer, cheaper and faster than paper votes. It comes now that there are more frauds and errors, it is 4 times more expensive and we only gain two hours for the results. I prefer the good old paper ballot, seems more democratic to me (there are a chosen number of independent citizens and parties witnesses to do the counting, and democratic control is purely impossible with the computer assisted method).

Well, I think it is almost all. I thought it could be interesting to have the point of view from a European citizen on how things work here. It's fairly different because of two major differences : 1 We have a much much much smaller country, with as many inhabitants as in NY. 2 We don't have the same political culture.

I hope it interested you (anyway you didn't have to read it if it didn't ;-) ) and it was understandable (my english isn't as good as I would want it to be - especially for such technical matters)...

If you have any question don't hesitate - I love talking about politics...
Making it illegal not to vote would never fly here in the U.S. Regardless of whether you had to choose a specific candidate or not, requiring people to vote would be considered as much of a strike against civil liberties as refusing a legitimate voter the opportunity to vote--maybe even more so (vis-a-vis the attempts by one party or another to try to suppress the get-out-the-vote efforts of the other party or to challenge new registrations, etc.)

It is interesting to learn about how other countries do it.