What are some strange facts about elections?

The most strange, but no less amazing ways people voting in different countries:

Online –

The most convenient voting system, don’t you think? Just by sitting at home, in your living room with a laptop and the cup of tea people of Estonia, for example, voting since 2005. And if in 2005 only 2% of the electorate voted online, in 2017 their number increased to 40%. How is that possible? Thanks to the national ID cards, which are embedded with unique chips and PIN codes, the country has collected their ballots online. But, you may agree that this method of voting is not very convenient for older people, who not only do not understand the online systems, but often do not have access to the Internet.

You may know that the countries like the United States and Norway have also tried an online ballot, but soon left this idea behind.

With fingertip –

Biometric systems are already used in many areas of our lives: mobile phones, ID cards, biometric passports and more, but the governments of 25 African countries have advanced further and several years try to implement a biometric voting system to avoid fraud. Nice initiative, but poor execution. This system didn’t justify itself accompanied by failures in the operation of a technology, fingerprint reading kits failed, for example, in Kenya laptops ran out of battery only an hour into polling that caused a delay in voting results by a week.

By the way, the Ghanaian government spent about $76 million on biometric voting systems for the election (one vote costs $44). Just for comparison, the average price of a vote in an established democracy is about $1-$3.

By marbles –

I bet you don’t know that the people democratic voting power in Gambia comes in the shape of a little round glass marble. Also Gambia has an interesting process of voting. Everyone with a glass marble should roll it down into the iron chute representing their choice candidate. Maybe, it’s not even the most rarely encountered, but also the noisiest way to vote. But I’m sure you will doubt the honesty of this type of voting after knowing that for 22 years the country has been headed by one president, who received power through a coup.

From space –

Don’t be in a hurry to be surprised, according to PBS, this is quite a common thing, only in the address section list “lower-earth orbit”. The first man landed… no, the vote from space was Leroy Chiao in 2004. After him that was Clayton Anderson in 2014 and Kate Rubins in 2016.