So it looks like Obama won the election...

[squeezles]

However, I'm curious about polling in America, since it (seems) to be different from Australia (forgive me if these are ignorant questions!).

- why isn't voting compulsary? 
- why don't people vote? is it laziness? or they don't feel obligated to?
- how old do you have to be to vote?
- what are the criteria for absentee voting (posting a vote in before

Comments

[carama]

It's compulsory to vote here in NZ, but it is compulsory to enrolled to vote. I think that we generally get reasonably good turnouts though. Not sure about the felon thing.

[carama]

D'oh, I meant that "It's NOT compulsory to vote..."

[squeezles]

That's interesting. I know that here if people have some moral objection to voting that they "throw away their vote" by either not marking the paper, deliberately marking it incorrectly or making up a candidate to vote for.

I don't see the point of that, considering you have to go to the effort to go to the polling booth, line up, register etc why not make it worthwhile at least.

[kittycat_black]

Even though its illegal to not be enrolled to vote here heaps of people just don't enroll. Apparently they really don't follow up on it. I've known of a number of people over the years who just never enrolled and they never got in any trouble for it.

[squeezles]

Eeek! Did you just type this all out!?

It's always interested me that in America things you can't drink until you are 21, but you can do lots of other "adult" things at 18. Not that I think it's bad to delay drinking until 21, it just seems like a disparity.

In Australia, polling is always on a Saturday to maximise the opportunity for people to vote (from 8am - 6pm), so it has always struck me as weird that you seem to have it on a week day. This morning we heard that people were lining up at 4am "to avoid the wait" and I thought "what time do they open then...because if it's not until 8am that's still a long wait!!". We have similar voting locations here...I just remember from one of the Bush elections of reports of there not being many polling booths, which struck me as odd as surely there would be lots of buildings that booths could be set up in and therefore you'd think there shouldn't be too much of a logistical problem.

Anyway, thank you for your well explained answers :)

[nagirrebailed]

The drinking age used to be 18 but then through the lobbying of a group called Mothers Against Drunk Driving the age was increased to 21. There is a bit of a political murmur coming from universities (that is university administrations and trustee boards) to lobby to lower the drinking age again so as to decrease the large amount of binge drinking that takes place on campuses and such.

[squeezles]

Thank you for your answers too :)

I think I heard from one of the Bush elections that there was a deliberate (or theorised deliberate) move to only open a few polling booths in areas where the vote for Bush (sorry I can't remember whether he's a Republican or Democrat) was less certain to reduce the number of votes against him. That sounds pretty sneaky. We have polling booths in public libraries, schools and other public buildings and there are lots of them scattered all over (but then again we have to vote - or at least have our names ticked off as voting).

[turtleblues]

my own verision of the answers

[squeezles]

Do they restructure the voting districts a bit here. It's interesting about the people with similar names to felons getting struck off the list though. That must be annoying

[mtb0001]

Good answers from your other friends, but I'll add

[squeezles]

I'm glad that all your effort paid off!