I think elections should be held by mail, so that people can vote on whatever day they damn well please. Some states already do it that way.
I like putting a piece of paper in a box very much (and elections are always on Sundays in France so you don't have to choose between this and your job).
In Australia I went into a prepolling station and voted a week early.
Of course, compulsory voting definitely means things like these are required, but it never struck me that other countries wouldn't have the ability to prepoll
Some States years ago opened-up absentee voting to literally everybody who simply asks for an absentee ballot. In some counties in those States, the percentage of people voting absentee was so high they just shut down the polling stations and have everybody vote absentee by default.
Now that said, we are the US, and that means we have this thing called "the South", and people in "the South" want to have strict controls over the polling process and require ID because that makes it easier for them to exclude people who have the "wrong" skin color from participating.
The US is a very large and very diverse country, and compared to European countries has very little central control when it comes to things like, for example, how elections are run. That's all State and county level.
Is this you advocating for illegal inmigrant vote or are you saying that IDs are often denied to non-whites?
Anything that makes it logistically easier to vote is resisted in certain states because it would increase the turnout of poor and minority voters.
Though you should be free to submit a ballot of as little as a single mark (the mark being that you abstain from all contests on the ballot). If you vote in any single one you'd need to complete the rest, to ensure you ballot cannot be tampered with later.
Since we have a secret ballot, it would be unenforceable for them to say that you had to submit a valid ballot.
> What you do after that in the little booth with just your conscious and a pen is up to you. (I usually take the pen, that's all I've ever got out of politics.)
Odd, my voting place last election only had pencils. I carried a pen with me (voting with a pencil is asking for trouble).