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Ear to the Ground

Gambians Vote With Marbles

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Posted on Sep 22, 2006
marbles

Chief electoral officer Kawsu Ceesay told a BBC interviewer: “The system also makes the counting process much more transparent.”

Check out the Gambian voting system. It’s enviably simple: “Voters enter a booth and pop a clear glass marble into one of three drums representing the candidates.” The marble hits a bell on its way down, preventing people from voting more than once. No hanging chads, no hacking, just a satisfying plunk when your vote goes in.  Are we advocating marbles? No, but a paper trail would be good.

BBC:
Voters enter a booth and pop a clear glass marble into one of three drums representing the candidates, instead of a putting a ballot paper into a box.

As the marble falls into the drum, it hits a bell so officials can tell if anyone votes more than once.

“It’s a unique system introduced in 1965 because of Gambia’s high illiteracy,” Gambia’s chief electoral officer Kawsu Ceesay told the BBC.

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By Broiler, September 24, 2006 at 7:02 pm Link to this comment
(Unregistered commenter)

Wow! We could use this system in the US but we’ve

Wait for it…..................................

 

Lost our marbles!

 

Look, what were you expecting? Trashing the Gambians
for their high illiteracy rate? You could do worse than
marbles and bells. It would take some doing but
you could do worse.

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