From voter registration to mail-in ballots, how do countries around the world run their elections?
Ahead of the 2020 U.S. election, here’s a look at how elections are run in the United States and other countries around the world.
Numbers, Facts and Trends Shaping Your World
Ahead of the 2020 U.S. election, here’s a look at how elections are run in the United States and other countries around the world.
Many of the millions of Americans voting in Tuesday’s midterm elections will have to do so while working around the demands of their jobs – hitting their polling places before work, taking an extra-long lunch break or going afterward and hoping to make it before the polls close. As they stand in line, many of them may wonder why it is that the United States votes on a Tuesday, of all days.
Turnout in this year’s primaries for Congress and most state governorships surged compared with the last midterms in 2014, particularly among Democrats. Nearly a fifth (19.6%) of registered voters – about 37 million – cast ballots in primary elections for the U.S. House of Representatives – a 56% increase over the 23.7 million who voted in 2014’s House primaries. Turnout that year was 13.7% of registered voters.
Read a Q&A with Michael Dimock, president of Pew Research Center, on recent developments in public opinion polling and what lies ahead.
The firm that runs the presidential exit poll expects to interview about 100,000 voters across the country by the time the polls close on election night.
Although the movement to limit congressional terms has been largely dormant for the past two decades, 15 states do limit how many terms their own legislators can serve.
The great majority of Americans who vote on Election Day will use one of two basic technologies: “fill-in-the-bubble” and other optical-scan ballots, or touch-screen computers and other direct recording electronic systems.
Long years of service have been the norm for past speakers, most of whom had accumulated twice as much time in the House as today’s candidates before wielding the gavel.
If Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker wins the Republican presidential nomination next year, he’ll be the first major-party nominee without a college degree since Barry Goldwater in 1964.
If history is any guide, well under half of eligible voters will come out to vote in Tuesday’s midterms.
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