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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 7, 2024

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We've had multiple simultaneous elections. E.g. municipal elections, provincial elections, water board elections, district committee elections, the EU parliament elections, and referendums back when we still had them. They try to avoid it, scheduling them apart from each other, but when they are combined you just get e.g. three separate voter cards, three separate ballots, etc. This is a bitch to count which is why they rather not do it.

Eligibility may vary: someone from another EU country can vote in the EU parliament elections, can vote in a municipal or district committee election if they have lived there for at least 5 years, and can't vote in any other elections. There may be multiple elections going on at once, and you can only vote in one of them, so you just get only the one voting card and your neighbour may get all of them.

We don't get to vote for judges or school boards, sadly, so maybe it does not scale to the level of democracy in the US. On the other hand you could of course just spread them out and just have a couple of elections every year. We run our elections mostly using volunteers already, so it doesn't need to be that expensive (and democracy is worth something, right?).

counties run elections, here

The municipalities run the elections here, but there are set standards for doing so. They have to print the voter cards and the ballots and set up the polling booths (the picture of the voter card I linked has the coat of arms of the municipality of Sliedrecht on it, for example), but they have to follow the same process everywhere.

You can't assume everyone has an address!

Ah, but you can. If you really are homeless, you are supposed to register at a shelter in the municipality where you last lived before you became homeless. Then you'll get your mail there. I guess if you're truly vagrant you'll have trouble, but that surely can't be too different anywhere else.

(Edit: though this actually can be a bit of a problem. People may live in (ahem) informally rented housing, so they can't register. Especially students and other young people. This is technically illegal, but tolerated. They leave their registration at their parents' house. They can vote, but would have to travel back "home" to do so (or ask one of their parents to be their proxy). They also can't vote for local elections in the place where they actually live, since on paper they don't live there.)

Nor that they check their mail.

That's on them.

We've had multiple simultaneous elections. E.g. municipal elections, provincial elections, water board elections, district committee elections, the EU parliament elections, and referendums back when we still had them.

If only it were that simple

(pdf warning) https://s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/wakegov.com.if-us-west-1/s3fs-public/documents/2024-09/November%205th%20General_SampleBallots_Guide_0.pdf

See the 181(!) ballot styles for Wake County NC (home of the state capital, Raleigh, and one of the state's 100 counties) starting on page 11. Your ballot depends on exactly which districts you live in for various things, which usually don't line up. These ballots this year are actually on the small side IME; it's usually 3-4 pages rather than 2.