Elections in France are on a Sunday, when almost everyone is off work.(in US it's always Tuesday?)
Photo IDs are low cost there and mandatory. Everyone has a photo ID.
Polling stations are not a "million miles away", you will not see regular multi hour lines in France.
And finally - you cannot win, unless you get at least 50% + 1 vote. In US and UK - a simple plurality of votes makes you a winner.
Early voting, including one or more Sundays, is available in the Republican states that people are complaining about, e.g. Texas and Georgia.
> Photo IDs are low cost there and mandatory. Everyone has a photo ID.
Georgia accepts one of six forms of photo ID, and if you don't have any of those, you can get a free ID at your county registrar's office: https://sos.ga.gov/page/georgia-voter-identification-require...
> Polling stations are not a "million miles away", you will not see regular multi hour lines in France.
Does this picture of Atlanta, Georgia, look like the polling places are a "million miles away?" https://gismaps.fultoncountyga.gov/portalpub/apps/webappview.... In the U.S., polling sites are typically run by the county or municipality. You see multi-hour lines in Democrat-run counties like Fulton (the county encompassing most of Atlanta), for the same reason you see long lines for other government services in these places.
But that is not when most polling stations are open. Only a small subset are... because everyone is expected to vote on a Tuesday.
> free ID at your county registrar's office
Yep. People that can't get to their DMV will surely have time to go to county registrar's office.
> In the U.S., polling sites are typically run by the county or municipality.
And I'm sure that financing does not affect availability of these sites, right?
This is HN, not Facebook, I'm sure most here are aware of how systems operate and and have heard of compounding effects.
Not true. Under the Georgia law, for example, counties are required to provide at least two Saturdays of early voting, and certain large urban counties are required to provide early voting in certain designated locations. Insofar as polling places are often schools and similar locations, obviously there will be fewer early voting polling locations. But in Atlanta, for example, there are typically dozens in key locations such as public libraries accessible by public transit.
> Yep. People that can't get to their DMV will surely have time to go to county registrar's office.
In France you have to apply for your national ID card in person as well. In Germany and most German-speaking countries, you’re required to show up in person to the municipality within 30 days of moving to a new location. People manage.
> And I'm sure that financing does not affect availability of these sites, right?
Yeah, and more affluent counties typically vote democrat. In Georgia, it’s certainly not the mostly white rural counties that have all the money.
> This is HN, not Facebook, I'm sure most here are aware of how systems operate and and have heard of compounding effects.
I think there are a lot of people who are willing to make assumptions and believe wild exaggerations about people on the other side of the political aisle.
It's not, you're just failing to correctly identify the problem. Elections must not only be secure as a matter of fact, but be perceived as secure. The security of an election must be apparent on its face, to different groups who have adverse interests and don't trust each other. Watch how people in Taiwan count votes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cqKt-lPfJuw. They don't do it this way to address fraudulent elections in the past. They do it so that the vote counting is above question.
Election procedures where the integrity of the voting is established by after-the-fact studies or the results of litigation showing the absence of fraud are bad procedures that don't actually satisfy all the requirements for good elections. This is not a republican versus democrat thing. Election denial after 2020 undoubtedly has been especially bad--which in part shows that election procedures should be robust against demagoguery!--but more than a third of democrats believed that the 2004 election was stolen, and about the same percentage of republicans believed the same thing about the 2012 election: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/12/04/many-repu.... The numbers for the GOP right now are double that, but it's also worth observing that the 2004 and 2012 elections didn't occur against the backdrop of last-minute pandemic-related changes to voting procedures.
Either way, a system where an incumbent wins by multiple points (Bush won by 2.4 and Obama by 3.9) and still one out of three members of the losing party still think they cheated is dangerous to democracy.
You tell me this and then immediately confirm my statement. All polling stations are open on the voting tuesday, but a subset are open on early voting days.
> People manage.
Clearly they don't.
And clearly Voter ID laws are not at all useful in US, like they wouldn't be useful in UK.
Given how sparsely populated country was in 19th century, and how cumbersome travel was back then, do you think that democracy in the US in 19th century was impossible?
That aside, though: voting in the 19th century looked nothing like it does today. Most of what we think of as modern Democratic voting (the secret ballot, registration, etc) are Progressive Era reforms.
So, how is it? Is democracy only possible in heavily urbanized countries, so that the citizens never are in more than walking distance from a polling place? Or, hopefully, it is a more general political systems that can apply to more varied range of human societies?
Before I responded to your original comment, I did some poking around about 19th century voting practices. It's an interesting question. If you want to keep talking about it, can I ask first if you've taken the time to do the same thing? This is one of those discussions where we don't have to derive everything axiomatically.
That's a curious characterization given your original question is a gotcha question, someone just replied to it as if it wasn't.
I don't know what "this is HN, not Facebook" is supposed to mean, but I'm pretty sure the guidelines ask you not to write stuff like that.
Fulton County holds just 17% of the Atlanta metropolitan area population, and is the densest part at that. In other words, it's an outlier.
Technically it’s a bit weird because you can have more than one polling station in the same area, so it might be a bit confusing. But the procedure is such that you can’t put a ballot in the wrong box.
A big detail in France is that there is only one ballot at a time, in the US, my wife had 74 ballots simultaneously last time I checked. The US has an election every 2 years in November, and all the ballots are attached to this schedule. In France we have ballots at random date, when each term is finishing (and we elect far less people)
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abstention_%C3%A9lectorale_en_...
I know in Germany voting also happens on Sunday and everything but restaurants and gas stations used to be closed on Sundays.
Some small supermarket/stores are open sunday morning.
Some small stores (family managed) are open all sunday (I have one 100 meters from my home which is open 8am to 8pm all days).