For All the Marbles: Voting Around the World

Sept. 26, 2006 — -- With reports that some new electronic voting machines can be hacked, along with the computers that store the results, modern voting techniques have been getting an increasingly bad rap.

And who could ever forget the hanging chad debacle from Florida's 2000 presidential election?

Yes, the year is 2006, but while countries like Britain and the United States experiment with hypertechnical methods of voting -- from text messaging to touch screens -- some countries employ systems closer to those used by the original purveyor of democracy, ancient Greece -- and with greater success.

The small African country of Gambia held elections on Sept. 22 that bore more of a resemblance to the Greek tradition of placing pebbles in a basket, than the modern-day ballot boxes and voting machines.

In the Gambian balloting method, each person places one marble in a bucket marked with his or her candidate's color.

The simple system is designed to facilitate voting for the country's many illiterate citizens.

Similar "traditional" voting methods exist for many countries in which literacy is a problem.

In Indonesia, voters use a nail to pierce a picture of the candidate's face or a symbol for the party.

The graphic method of voting was successful until 2004, when many votes were invalidated when improper folding caused many ballots to be punched twice.

Likewise, Afghanistan pastes postage-stamp size symbols, usually farm equipment or animals, next to the names of candidates and parties to make them easy to decipher.

Forgoing props or pictures, the small sovereign city of Appenzell in Switzerland gathers in the town square on the last Sunday in April every year to appoint authorities and vote on resolutions.

Believed to have first convened in 1378, the Appenzell voting assembly is made up of Swiss citizens over 18, with voting cards used as identification to enter the square.

Men, however, can leave their voting cards at home if they wear their rapier, a long sword that is traditionally worn to the event.

Local cultural twists on the democratic process of voting are becoming increasingly rare.