Ballot box

Ballot box in a polling station ( Lutherschule Hannover )

A ballot box is a closed container with a slot for carrying out a (usually secret) election or voting with ballot or ballot papers.

Germany and Austria

In a voting booth, unobserved and unaffected, voters tick one or more ballot papers or ballot papers and then fold them or put them in an envelope in the ballot box. The locked ballot box will be publicly emptied after the election or voting at the polling station so that the ballot papers or ballot papers can be counted. If the ballot box is transported before the counting, it will be sealed, if not done before, to prevent manipulation .

Switzerland

Main article: Ballot box

In Switzerland, voting usually takes place at home. After the voting process, the ballot papers are put in an official voting envelope, which can be sent in a return envelope or handed in at a polling station. If you hand it in at a polling station, the voting envelope is thrown into an urn. After the end of the election, the voting envelopes are unpacked from the post office and urn in the counting offices and the ballot papers are then counted.

Others

Transparent ballot boxes are mandatory in France, for example, and are intended to prevent elections from being manipulated by placing ballot papers in the ballot box before the actual ballot.

Prepared ballot boxes were used to manipulate election results in San Francisco in the 1850s . They had a double side wall and a double bottom, behind which a significant number of ballot papers in favor of the fraudster were hidden before the election. After the election, an initiate only had to remove the double walls and / or floors. (see illustration below from 1856)

There are also voting systems without ballot papers, in which, for example, balls of different colors are thrown into the urn. However, these are not common in state elections.

photos

Voting at the ballot box, Munich 2008
Ballot box from Rottweil, mid-19th century (at that time still in the typical urn shape )
Transparent ballot box, France 2007
Ballot box prepared for election fraud, Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper , 1856
Bin as a ballot box, central election office in the technical town hall of Bochum , 2017