My understanding is that the ballot is more complicated in US elections. You are not voting for a single MP, you are voting for a Representative to the house, and one for the state house. You may be voting for a Senator and a state Governor. You will probably be voting for a host of local officials. In many (most?) states, there are ballot initiatives (sort of like referendums) on various issues. It gets complicated, fast.

That's just numbers. You're making say 5 votes rather than 1. In some places in the UK we can have MEP, MP, Borough Council, Local Council and Mayor all elected on the same day, as well as local referendums.

That's not complicated -- just post each vote in a different box (paper can be different colours) and count them separately. OK it may take a day or two to find out who your local parish councillor is. Whoopee.

Just numbers. But leaving aside ballot questions (of which there are usually around a half dozen in Massachusetts, more in some places like California), there were 13 state-level elected officials in 2018 plus whatever county-level or local officials there were on the town ballot. So you can be making 20-30 choices. That's a lot of paper shuffling.

How on earth do you spend time to adequately research so many decisions without overload?

You don't really. There's usually lots of news about most of the ballot questions and the top state level offices. You may or may not be familiar with your local Congressional race and the lower-level state offices.

You probably start to get fuzzy about your state rep/senator. And are pretty much clueless about the county Sheriff, Board of Selectmen, and Register of Deeds.

In practice, a lot of the positions lower down on the list are running unopposed or have been in their position and seemed to have done fine for a while. Of course, this being Massachusetts, a lot of these seats are pretty much Democrat locks anyway.

In Colorado, we often often have ~15 ballot initiatives, as well as city, county, and state elections. That's on top of the federal elections. Most of our domestic policy is dictated at the local level rather than the federal level, and it is this decentralized nature which flummoxes our European friends.

Local referendums rather than representative democracy is odd - don’t you pay your reps to research the options and make the beat descision. I wouldn’t have time to understand 15 options

We tend to have 5 or 6 layers of government too so I don’t see the problem there.

We do not have a federal sales tax (i.e. VAT). Europe hasn't had yearly GDP growth over 1% in 25 years, and Europe is issuing bonds at negative % rates. The U.S. subsidizes the European military defenses and pharmaceutical prices to boot.

I have no issue with European countries sovereign decisions, but when Europeans project their ideas on Americans I take great offense.

Five votes is very low. 15-20 is common.

Was not wank counted as a vote?

Reminds me of the line from some American tv show where one character says "I don't vote, I just write down Jesus," and another says "we count that as a Republican vote."

Yup (although that wasn't at my count, or indeed election - there are rules about secrecy so I couldn't possibly comment on some of the actual comments)

https://www.joe.co.uk/politics/voter-writes-wnk-all-over-bal...

Here in Russia (and I assume in other countries too) we have rules where the mark can be put and where it cannot be, so if you write anything outside of the box, it won't be counted.

Since a lot of the ways we do things in the states are pretty ridiculous, I feel the need to clarify for foreigners that this does not actually fly. As I recall, it was only a few election cycles ago someone in my state had been convicted of vote fraud for for filling in the republican candidate option on votes that were left blank on ballots which had otherwise voted republican on every other vote. This amounted to two modified ballots.

Are you talking about the ballot harvesting in North Carolina, or the fraud investigations in Georgia? If it's the latter, we don't have any good way to estimate the impact because the ruling party destroyed evidence and canned the investigations[0]

[0] https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.cnn.com/cnn/2019/07/26/poli...