Question for Americans

[pyat]

Why are voting lines in the U.S. so long? I'm reading about six hour waits in some early voting places, and I seem to recall tales of "lines around the block" in the last election. Are there only a small number of voting stations?

I've never heard anyone up here complain about waiting in line to vote - or, if they did it was a matter of "It took me 15 minutes to get to the polling station! What a mad house!" sort of thing.

Do we do things differently, or is this just a matter of freak incidents getting media attention?

Comments

[viktor-haag.livejournal.com]

I wouldn't be surprised if the US, although their voter base is an order of magnitude larger than ours, doesn't provide an order of magnitude more voting stations. It also wouldn't surprise me if our low-fi voting procedure produces shorter actual voting times for each individual voter. Finally, how many advance polling events does the US permit? Our latest federal election spread voting at polls over, what, four days? Is that the same in the US?

At this last election, it took me five minutes to vote. That includes travel time, on foot, from my living room. The longest part of the procedure was walking to the polling station. Anecdotally, I think in the last few elections I can remember, the longest I've ever spent voting once arriving at the actual polling station was maybe ten minutes: and that was an aberration (I had to be sworn in and affirmed at a rural riding once, and that took most of the time). Since that time, the longest I've had to wait was three or four minutes in line.

[zenten.livejournal.com]

My wife was working at a polling station this year, and when I came in to bring her dinner the lineup for her station was taking around 20-30 minutes.

[viktor-haag.livejournal.com]

Wow; that's impressive. I guess part of my situation also is that, because of the distance I work away from my home, and the age of my kids, I have tended for the last decade not to vote during peak hours. This would likely also explain the lack of line-ups I've experienced...

[zenten.livejournal.com]

During the day there were weird spikes, so that one station would have a wackload of people, while another would be empty. I think by 6pm though everyone was getting the lineups I described.

We always vote early anyway though.