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The history of voter suppression in certain states cannot be ignored. The argument you're presenting is misleading because the intent of the system is clearly to discourage specific groups of people from voting. There's a long history of voting machines not working (on purpose), inadequate staffing, restrictive laws, and all of this malfeasance curiously manifesting in neighborhoods with specific demographics. People are saying the pandemic and high voter turnout changes things but...

> The Clayton County resident, who registered to vote in Georgia when he moved six months ago, showed up at the Frank Bailey Senior Center in Riverdale, Georgia, at 9 a.m. hoping to cast his vote early. At 2 p.m. Dubose had just reached the front of the line -- that ran hundreds deep and snaked around the senior center into the back parking lot.

https://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/10/28/georgia.voting/index...

> According to a local election official interviewed by CBS News' Phil Hirschkorn, the last "early voter" in line for Saturday's truncated early voting in Palm Beach County finally got to cast a ballot at 2:30 a.m Sunday morning, which means that voter waited in line for more than seven hours. In Miami, another traditional Democratic stronghold, the wait was said to be nearly as long.

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/11/no-one-...

> The history of voter suppression in certain states cannot be ignored.

Agreed but mostly orthogonal. Providing early voting at all is a drastic improvement reducing voter suppression. Since it lasts for multiple days, it allows for many more people to vote on days off work and other commitments, when they may not be able to easily vote on election day. Providing better early voting would of course do an even better job of this.

You can’t ignore the attempt to actively make early voting WORSE though, like Texas removing ballot drop off locations that were already in place and changing the rules to only allow one location per county. That isn’t “old rules are out of date and need updating”, that is “actively making the current system worse to suppress voting”

I'm not sure what you're looking for here? Do you want an endorsement that I don't like voter suppression? Because sure, I don't like voter suppression. But you keep bringing up points that are at best tangentially related to the actual topic at hand here. I don't dispute that there's shit that happens, but I also don't see the connection to long lines at early voting.

> I think there was likely not much thought put into the number of early voting locations. It's always been viewed as a low-budget, customer-friendly alternative to voting on election day. That probably should have been re-evaluated given the pandemic and the likelihood of greater numbers of early voters

This part of your earlier comment makes it seem like you are arguing that the early voting issues are simply logistical issues because they didn't "re-evaluate" their process for the pandemic.

I am pointing out evidence that these problems aren't from a lack of planning, but from active suppression.

If you look at any particular incident (like the long lines for early voting in this case), you can think of a lot of innocent reasons it might be happening. When you see the pattern, and you see clear and active suppression, you can't just say "well, all of these other incidents are just poor planning"

You are using the phrase “active suppression” in a way I have never seen it used before.

Extending the use of the phrase to describe these sort of political tactics has a downside. It waters down the emotional impact of the phrase when being used to describe, say, the poll tax or grandfather clauses in the US South. Real voter suppression.

And thus, in a backhanded sort of way, dilutes the honor of those early civil rights workers who fought, and sometimes died, so that everyone got a chance to vote. Why would you want to do that?

> So, these lines are not representative of an actual election day.

So you claim. And yet we regularly see this kind of pictures on actual US election days. For example, a very quick DuckDuckGo image search for "us elections long lines" leads to this as the second hit: https://www.firstpost.com/photos/world-gallery/us-2012-elect...

Here's hard data showing that long lines like these aren't the norm: https://medium.com/mit-election-lab/insights-into-voting-wai...

Correct. The sabotage is targeted. Per that cite, non whites experience longer waits.

Agreed, and that's not acceptable, but no group is experiencing wait times of several hours each election, which seems to be the conclusion drawn by many readers of the BBC article.

There is so much evidence that people are denied the opportunity to vote.

I'm still pissed off about blacks being turned away in Ohio 2004. They literally just closed and locked the doors. Telling the 1,000s of voters standing in the cold rain for hours to piss off.

To cite one example.

And it keeps happening.

Yes, I haven't seen a single person saying that voting in the US is perfect or that no voter suppression takes place.

What I am saying (and others are as well) is that the BBC article seems to be mischaracterising/misunderstanding what is happening with respect to the very long lines for in-person early voting in this specific case.

Ok. We need a "Yes, and..." way to respond to issues, acknowledging the problem while vetting specific reports.

Because I admit I read your responses as denial or concern trolling.

Peace.

Thanks for this! "Not the norm" is a bit of an over-interpretation though. That data shows that in many states such lines were indeed the norm until very recent reforms (as in, there is only one post-reform data point to go on). And that the reforms didn't help non-white voters to the same extent that they did white voters.

The data shows that hours-long waits are not and haven't been the norm, as I stated.

There is data on wait times from 4 elections in the article, none of which supports a claim that the wait times shown in the BBC article are at all normal.

It's obvious that you're looking to draw a very specific conclusion regardless of the data presented, so best of luck with that.

"Not the norm" is a cop-out. Is it the average person's experience? No, and nobody says that it is. The BBC article doesn't say that the average voter needs to wait for hours. But many voters do.

It's not a cop-out, it's a summary of the facts, as opposed to your claims that "many" voters wait in lines like the ones shown in the article and the random picture you found.

Like many of the individuals quoted in the BBC article, you know nothing about how voting in the US works and don't understand why people are choosing to stand in these lines right now, weeks before the actual election day and before all early voting locations are even open in many areas, but are very eager to make condescending comments.

Thanks for confirming my suspicion that you have no interest in a discussion about anything other than your inaccurate, preconceived notions.

It's you who is being condescending. Anyway, we both seem to agree that people -- an unknown number, and certainly not the average voter -- stand in lines for hours to vote. I acknowledge that you think it's significant that they are choosing to do so.

713,000 voters for 301 locations. Assuming 356k vote on election day, and voting takes place over 12 hours. That's still about 100 per hour and location. And that's ignoring that most will likely vote on their way from/to work (spices in demand), and that polling locations are most likely not perfectly distributed according to the population distribution.

Germany has 73,000 locations for 61,690,000 voters. Germany has roughly 4x the number of locations per voter.

I assume it takes 20-25 minutes to cast a ballot.

I once timed voters, data gathering in the debate between paper ballots vs touchscreens. From signing the poll book to dropping ballot in the box. Avg 21 minutes, for both paper and electronic (no significant difference). For a moderately sized general election ballot (~40 issues and races).

Election administrators absolutely know these timings, how to properly do capacity planning. Whether they admit it or not.

--

In my jurisdiction, dropping off a ballot is trivial. It's just a box. Drive or walk up. Open safety door. Drop the ballot.

I read that Texas requires proper identification to drop off ballots. And prohibits 3rd party help, eg wife cannot deliver husband's ballot. (I can't imagine any scenario where that extraneous step is merited.) So factor in the actual time & motion data per jursidiction. Because as we know, every jurisdiction insists on doing their own thing, independent of all other considerations.

So in Germany, the ratio is 845 voters per place. this seems to be quite high compared to North America.

For comparison, here are the numbers in Canada for 2019 [0]:

Registered electors: 27,300,000

Polling places: 20,000

Thus, the ratio is 1365 ppl per polling place.

This is only 60% of the ratio in Germany. I am from Canada and I don't think we have any problems with voer supression.

[0] https://www.elections.ca/content.aspx?section=med&dir=bkg&do...

Are you saying that this is fine because everyone knows early voting means limited number of polling stations?

You also cherry-picked a specific county with an extreme difference. Are they all 60x difference?

I didn't cherry pick, I picked a county I'm familiar with because I live there. Maybe some other people can chime in with their local areas. But since Georgia was one of the two areas mentioned in the article, let's look at Fulton county, which is where Atlanta, GA is located. It looks like there's about 30 early polling locations [0] vs 380 or so polling locations on election day [1]. So still 12-13x differential.

[0] https://www.fultoncountyga.gov/services/voting-and-elections...

[1] (PDF) https://www.fultoncountyga.gov/-/media/Precinct-LocatorNovem...

EDIT: I forgot the address the first sentence. I believe I made it quite clear that I see missed opportunity here.

I posted something similar to the parent below.

There has been 1 open polling location in my county, with a dozen or so more opening this week, and hundreds more opening for election day. All the other counties near me are following the same model.

I haven't seen data for every locality, but in my experience, yes there is an extreme difference between the number of early polling locations vs. the number open on election day.

> “ And by far, the biggest problem is that election day is always on a Tuesday and is not a national holiday. IMO this would be the best change to make first, to enable more people to be available for voting.“

that would be nice and i’d support such a bill, but it wouldn’t likely increase voting rates drastically, as many (esp. working class) folks still work on (most) holidays.

to increase participation materially, the motivation to vote needs to be intrinsic (duty, patriotism, solidarity, optimism, etc.), and we can foster that through better voting mechanisms (score voting), more choice (election finance reform), proportional representation, less corruption, and more fairness and honesty. a tall order for sure, but something we need to be pushing and making progress toward every single election.

just make the voting day into 3 voting days and legally require employers to give employees a day off to vote at full pay or face severe punishment up to jailtime.

Emphatic agreement. There are no silver bullets, quick fixes.

At the end of the day ordering the new iPhone should not be easier than voting

Clearly you don't remember the lines of people camping out multiple days to pick up an iPhone...

Then Apple adapted by allowing preorders. Now suffering the queues is elective.

This is hilarious to me because you are basically making the correct point, but with the wrong conclusion. Let's take as a potentially erroneous given that early voting worked perfectly OK. Then, in 2020, it's run exactly the same, but demand is larger than in previous years [0]. That might result in exactly what's being reported here.

So yes, Apple made a mistake with a novel experience. Looks like various supervisors of elections are maybe also making a mistake with a novel experience. But I the latter doesn't get the same slack as Apple?

And, to be fair, at least my local supervisor of elections sent extra mailings this year making it abundantly clear that mail-in voting was an option and how to register for it. So they did make obvious the availability of the preordering equivalent.

[0] I won't say larger than anticipated, because the likelihood is that no one bothered to anticipate at all. Otherwise they might have figured to open more early voting stations this year.

Election administrators are pretty good at projecting turnout. Historical data and all that. In the year 2020, there's exactly no reason any jurisdiction should have anything less than perfection running poll sites.

The only slack (goodwill) I'm willing to grant admins this cycle is the massive pivot to postal ballots on short notice, while fending off widespread sabotage and harrassment.

Postal balloting is very different from running poll sites. Oregon and Washington experienced a lot of growing pains. And they made the transition gradually. Even so, our admins experienced a lot of burnout.

I imagine OR and WA admins are in a lot of Zoom calls with noobs nationwide. Alas, some jurisdictions don't want to learn.

I expect 2020's election to be the biggest fubar imaginable.

Generally speaking, commercial enterprises are more accountable to customers and efficient than state endeavors. Fanatics still line up and camp overnight to obtain a new iPhone when they are first released.

That said, I've never waited more than a few minutes when voting on election day in the US.

Do queues like this normally happen for "early voting"?