As a non-American, I don’t know exactly how your polling works, but why am I seeing “plan your voting day” or “set a voting strategy” like they’ve done on the Cards Against Humanity voting campaign?
Where I live, it’s just show up on voting day and cast your ballot, or ask for a mail in ballot, or go to a special voting station if you need (or want) to vote early. Is it the same in the US, and this is just getting people to gather those last pieces of information early and put a reminder in the calendar? Or is there more to it than that?
Thanks!
How does a country like the US have hours long lines…
republicans are anti-democracy and have for decades put in place many obstacles for voting. they know that they only exist as a minority, and true democracy would limit their ability to fuck the rest of us over.
Because pubs like to deter voting
(Hey, non-Americans: “pubs” means “Republicans.” Bars and pubs don’t care whether we vote or not.)
I’ve been to a couple bars where you get a discount on a drink if you have an “I Voted” sticker.
One thing that I think non-USians don’t understand is that our elections are not ran by some non-partisan agency that has a goal of running an efficient, fair election. Our elections in general (although it varies by state) are ran by partisan actors who know which areas vote for their party and which ones don’t. They intentionally try to make it easy for their supporters and hard for their detractors to vote.
I live in Ohio if you couldn’t tell, and our chief elections officer (the Secretary of State) is not afraid to tell people that he wants Donald Trump to win the election. He is not neutral. That’s just the way it is here.
Don’t forget that the Ohio Supreme Court let the GOP just… Keep submitting shit district maps after being ordered to draw fair maps multiple times. We still haven’t drawn a new district map, that’s what Issue 1 is about.
The Ohio General Assembly has a long history of ignoring the Supreme Court. See the DeRolph decisions.
Intentional voter suppression.
This is uneducated speculation but what if more people are going to vote as elections get crazier and voting centers aren’t used to the higher volume?
You get even longer queues?
I mean to explain the current longer wait times
Ah I see. Well technically yes but that would be easily preventable with a modicum of planning so it’s much more likely that it’s a deliberate decision.
It really depends on location and turnout.
Here in my town, the longest I’ve ever waited was a minute or two. Small population, and plenty of booths.
When I lived in a city, I only voted twice, but both times I was waiting maybe ten minutes plus a little. That was, as I was told, average for that polling place. It was a church basement (not in the dank and drippy way lol), so it was a tad small for the number of people in the district. But, over at a school gym that was a polling place, I had a friend wait nearly a half hour. Despite the bigger space, the turnout was huge, and not typical for that specific polling place.
They try to make sure a space is big enough (when everything is working right) for the district, but it doesn’t always work perfectly.
Then, you’ve got locations where the voting organizers are willing to fuck over a specific district and the polls will be under staffed, have too few booths, and may have other impediments to getting things done efficiently.
So it’s not really a single factor that goes into the crazy wait times. Nor is an hour in line the default.
Tx… makes sense.