Also Australian here. Unironically the whole family looks forward to voting day for the snags. I've seen kids ask why voting day so far away. Is that sort of environment all the US is missing that makes this controversial?
For us Australians, I suspect that invites a huge range of questions, including how long are people normally waiting that they need water, and why would a nominally capitalist society legislate against selling libations and comestibles under these very specific conditions.
Nothing is stopping voters from drinking their own water and eating their own snacks in line.
I applaud laws that limit "gift giving" at the polls. The polls should not be a place where your vote is swayed by a gift.
If a partisan group started giving voters free food or beverages at a polling place, that would be illegal.
That sufficient number of people (to warrant passing such legislation) would be swayed on the topic of who to vote for, to disregard their experience and opinions built up over the past several years, in return for a $2 bottle of water to quench a mild thirst, seems inconceivable. I wonder if there's perhaps other reasons at play there.
I guess it may be interesting to look at whether there's any common features at all of all the state legislatures that have passed such laws this year.
I shouldn't have used Biden/Trump in my example, because where freebies really sway votes is not the POTUS, but in the dozens of other positions and issues on the ballot.
In Maryland this last election the ballot was like 4 pages long and took me many hours of prep work to determine who I wanted to vote for board of education, representatives in congress, etc. If you haven't done the prep work and only came to vote for the president, your vote in the other areas is up for grabs. That's why people at the polls try to stuff your hands with brochures and freebies that have names on them - anything to make their preferred candidate's name pop into your mind while you are filling out the ballot.
The what?! That sounds absolutely awful.
We have partisan people outside the front gates at schools etc for our polling booths, with a 'how to vote' but they tend to be very well behaved, and aren't allowed on the property, so it's a small and mild gauntlet.
At federal election time we have only two pieces of paper to fill out. A small green piece for (upper house) senate with 5-10 candidates, and a (ridiculously) large white sheet with ~130 names on it sorted in to about 40 columns for the (lower) house of representatives. Party / independent status is listed under each name on the former, and at the top of the columns on the latter.
The voting rules have relaxed slightly - several years ago for the lower house you could opt for one or more column headings with a numeric preference OR every person under the column headings. Even that typically took you less than ten minutes, and for most people the time consuming bit was to work out which fringe parties to put at the very end of your preferences.
IIRC now you can fill in as many preferences as you like below the column headings - until you get bored, basically. Either way this is a mechanism to let you select where your spill over preferences go to, rather than allowing your first preference to 'sell off' your votes, if it looks like they aren't going to obtain a seat. Ie. force your cascading preferences, rather than pass that decision onto your first preference.
Interestingly in the last federal election here a good 25% of the population did not vote for either of the two major parties (both of which are somewhere to the right of center, gung-ho on being all-in on fossil fuel, etc). That group of people is trending upwards the last several elections, so there's some small optimism that we may escape the end-game of a viciously partisan two-party system here.
In any case we have no other votes to cast at these events. (I recall a federal referendum about 20 years ago that was tied in to an election, but that would have been a 'yes or no' option on a separate, very small, piece of paper - with a LOT of public discussion preceding it, as it was the ol' chestnut of whether Australia should remove itself from the British Commonwealth and become a republic.)
Every aspect of the voting experience in the USA really does seem to be designed to be as hostile to the citizenry as possible.
Sounds like you may have interpreted @umvi's comment to mean they took "many hours" to fill out the ballot [on election day]. So, you gave a rundown of your ballot's mechanics as an example of how a ballot can be designed in a way that doesn't take "many hours" to complete.
I guess the argument is that because it's a weekday, you want to aggregate many into the one event.
An Act enabling the County to borrow money and issue bonds in an amount not exceeding $38,134,000 to finance the design, construction, reconstruction, extension, acquisition, improvement, enlargement, alteration, renovation, relocation, rehabilitation or repair of Public Safety Facilities (including Fire Department Facilities), as defined therein.
I think very few people actually bother to research such questions. They just either reflexively tick Yes or No.
Researching a better answer requires a lot of questions. Does the county actually need to repair its Public Safety Facilities? What new construction do they plan? Have they been spending their money well in the past?
Answering all that would take a fair bit of time. And there were a dozen items like that.