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

[leonard-arlotte.livejournal.com]

Where I live, we've had early voting for the past 3 weeks or so. They had a special early voting station here on campus for three days, and the Obama-zoids were campaigning heavily to get people in to vote... and people did, lining up in very long queues which were taking quite a while to get through.

As for election day, since we moved to the electronic balloting, they have fewer polling places, however we now can go to any polling place in the county, instead of the one specifically designated for our precinct. We just give them our name and address, which they verify in their list, then set up the smartcard to have the elections I'm supposed to vote for, and I go to the next open station.

Last year in the General election I went to a library on the way home from work, and got through in about 15 minutes.

Last spring in the Primary, I went over to the university polling place over lunch, and was through in about ten minutes. It will probably take longer this year, as more people are expected to turn out, but early voting has significantly lessened the congestion on election day.

It wouldn't surprise me, though, that the media is hyping the worst occurrences of lines at polling places.

[leonard-arlotte.livejournal.com]

I just saw the numbers for my county.

36000 have voted early. Another 35000-40000 are expected on Election Day itself. So nearly half of the expected voters have already cast their votes.

What's more, there are just over 104000 registered voters for the county. That means we're getting something in the neighborhood of 70-75% turnout. Unprecedented.

[pyat.livejournal.com]

That's excellent!