The Weirdest Ways People Have Voted

For a system that's over 2,000 years old, democracy seems the same everywhere. Candidates say things, voters decide who they trust, and the winner is decided by the basic math of who had more ballots to their name. But like many things humans create or attach themselves to — making them weird is par for the course.

In the United States, there are many different ways to vote as each of the states has their own process. Georgia uses electronic voting machines, while Alaska uses paper ballots. Anyone over 18 and can vote in this country, except for two cities in Maryland where that right extends to anyone over 16.

Humans adapt easily to all manner of different situations, and voting is no different. Here are some weird ways in which people all over the world vote. 

A secret ballot is not only normal in the 21st century, in most places it is the law. It is your vote, and nobody needs to know who you cast it for. How weird it is, then, that for most of the first  100 years of United States history, secrecy was nigh impossible because you probably voted out loud. From the colonial period through most of the 19th century in fact, according to the Magazine of the National Endowment of the Humanities, "viva voce — literally, 'with the living voice' — was how George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Abraham Lincoln would have voted, and were themselves voted into office." 

Voting was an event back then, a social occasion. Folks would trot down to their local polling place where a raised platform was usually erected. Individuals climbed up and voted where everyone could see you and hear the announcement of the chosen candidate(s). An election clerk was on hand to record each voter and their vote for the public record.

Voting was public in large part because the idea that your vote should be private was seen at the time as undemocratic. It was expected that a voter would vote for the public interest, not private gain. "The voter is under an absolute moral obligation to consider the interest of the public, not his private advantage," the Magazine of the NEH quotes John Stuart Mill. Open voting was another way to hold voters accountable.

Part of the reason elections were allowed to be such festive affairs wasn't just that people then were starved for entertainment — though there is some truth to that — but many of them had to travel a good ways in order to take part. As the Khan Academy explains, for the first few hundred years of American history, more people lived in rural areas than urban. It wasn't until well into the 20th century that most Americans lived in cities. Before that, many voters had to actually travel for a day or more to cast a ballot.

They also didn't come all at once. According to the Mapping Early American Elections Project, "States held elections at various times from March through November of the year preceding the opening of a new session of Congress." So voters would come in a few at a time over a certain period, depending on the state, and sometimes in wagons, trains, or huge parades organized by a candidate or political party. 

The flexibility required to vote like this however — with the times, dates, and locations for voting all under state control — left local election officials with a great deal of power. That they needed to be able to accommodate the often lengthy travel requirements for voters also meant they could close the polls early to prevent particular voters, say from an opposing party or persons of color or a different religion, from voting at all. 

No matter how easy it is to vote, getting people out to vote is a task which frustrates every candidate and campaign. Heck, as the New York Times explains, Australia has mandatory voting, and they still don't have 100% turnout. For all its myriad faults, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, better known as North Korea, has in fact had a stable government with a functionally perfect voter attendance. 

First of all, yes they really do have elections in North Korea. Every five years, North Koreans cast ballots on a number of different positions, from the Supreme People's Assembly (their national legislature) on down to local community councils and institutional administrators' seats. However, CNN describes, unlike western democracies, there is always only one name on the ballot for each position, and voters decide "Yes" or "No" for each lone candidate. Of course, all candidates are pre-selected by the party.

The real catch, per the Japan Times, is "Observers also say the government uses the mandatory elections as an unofficial census, keeping track of whether and how people voted, and interpreting any rejection of preselected candidates as treason." So when North Korean state media reports a 99.98% voter turnout, and Kim Jong-Un got 100% of the vote, they are probably, contrary to (or maybe right in line with) what you might expect from a dictatorship really telling the truth. 

One of the biggest obstacles for representative government is that it kind of requires an educated population to work and, as the nonprofit Our World in Data shows, it has only been in the last half-century that literacy has become the global norm. The Gambia was one of many nations gaining independence during the African decolonization period of the mid-1960s, and their struggle with widespread illiteracy led to a unique way of voting.

Voters in The Gambia don't use paper ballots. Or electronic ballots. Or voting booths really. Gambian voters face a series of colored iron drums, each drum representing a particular party or candidate and often adorned with party or campaign pictures and logos. Each voter is issued a marble that they drop in the drum of their choice where, according to the ACE Project, it will hit a bell on the way down so everyone knows the vote is legit and counted. But this also means that "on election day bicycles are banned from the immediate proximity of polling stations."

Sadly, as awesomely colorful as this system sounds, The Gambia is actually planning to lose their marbles. The chairman of the Gambian electoral commission told DW this year that the system has just grown too much for marbles to handle everything. "We used to have only two or three contestants," he said. "But today sixteen parties have registered candidates and we also have independent candidates."

Democracy may be messy, but it sure is simple — one person, one vote. Those with the most votes, win. Except when they don't. Some systems, in a quest for greater fairness or representation, complicate the one-vote system a bit. Ranked-choice voting, for instance, allows you to literally vote for more than one person, while in Estonia's online system you can vote more than one time. Then there's possibly the most famous example of a complicated voting system: America's electoral college. 

Not only is there not a national vote for president in the United States, but in each of the 50 state elections, the people don't technically vote directly for president. According to the U.S. Constitution, "Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors ...[who]... shall meet in their respective States, and vote by Ballot." Americans vote for the electors, and they vote for president. 

In fact, as Minnesota political reporter Eric Black points out, "The Constitution does not require a popular vote in connection with the presidential election." The states can choose their electors anyway they want. South Carolina, for instance, one of the original 13 states, didn't have a popular vote for the first 21 presidential elections. Until 1868, the state legislature chose the electors who chose the president, without asking the voters at all. 

Voting is serious business. Or so people like to tell themselves. The voting booth is a solemn place where important decisions are weighed, candidates are measured against each other, and choices are cast that potentially affect the lives of many millions of people. But that's no reason not to have fun with it. Polling places and voting locations are selected for their practical benefits to the neighborhood and process of voting — but are they really?

Voters all over America and all over the world have cast their ballots in some funky, strange, and outright weird places. Welsh voters can do so in a hair salon, including one named appropriately "Asylum." English voters can use everything from a pub to a real estate agent, while the Scots have voted in the back of a Ford (according to the Mirror, because the polling officer forgot the keys to the office).

In 2016, Politico complied a quirky list of the weirdest polling places that Americans voted in. Californians were able to vote in surf shops and lifeguard stations. Chicago repurposed a laundromat, and in 2008, Philadelphia actually turned a roller skating rink into a polling station. From Buddhist temples in L.A. to Chicago pool halls to an Iowa tractor barn, Americans have been voting in weird places, apparently for a very long time.