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 wonder if a big factor is not necessarily the density that the polling station must serve (i.e. the population of the people within the station's service radius), but rather the size of the staff (the effective bandwidth) of the polling station: it wouldn't surprise me at all if the rural stations had not only a smaller population to serve, but also roughly equivalent actual bandwidth to urban stations.

I suspect that the drawing of polling boundaries isn't just based on population, but also geography: there are probably rules or guidelines about the maximum travel burden to be placed on voters as well as population density to consider, which would naturally make urban polling stations have to serve a much higher density, and almost certainly not have the proportional increase in bandwidth that would let them match the throughput of rural stations.