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]

we also tend to have more candidates to choose from

This statement should not be so strong. I assume this to be the case, but I don't know it to be true. I think you're probably completely correct that simply by virtue of deciding more categories of things on each ballot, you make the voting choice take longer (i.e. one race with fifteen candidates probably produces shorter voting time than five races with three candidates in each): the simple act of multiplying the number of marks the voter needs to make makes the time longer, let alone adding to the complexity of the choice involved.

[hillarygayle.livejournal.com]

This is true, and I'll add my experience to it: in all the elections in which I've voted, you've got the big elections (presidential, senate, representatives, etc), the state elections, maybe some local stuff (which is almost impossible to find information on, and so very difficult to make up one's mind properly), and then ballot initiatives. The ballot initiatives take up the most time, because I read them carefully. Some of them are worded extremely poorly, and you have to re-read them a few times to make sure you want to vote on them (unless you've done your research ahead of time, which I recommend but hardly anyone actually does). I came damn close to voting FOR the Arkansas hetero marriage amendment when I intended to vote AGAINST it. Ever since then I've been adamant about finding the wordings ahead of time.