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).
This is straightforward when you have a national ID scheme.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identity_document#United_State...
Drivers licenses and equivalent ID are at the state level although there's now a fairly high level of standardization (if you get a REAL ID version--required for federal purposes like flying).
So basically government-issued photo ID is fairly readily available but it's (often) not free and can get tricky in cases where, for example, you don't have a permanent address. And, unless you have an existing chain of ID documents, you need your birth certificate at some point.)
A student id from a university might have a passport sized photo stapled to it.
It has national ID standards for drivers licenses, but as far as I know it doesn't issue any kind of national-level ID document besides passports (and passport cards), and you can only get those as a citizen.
No. I kinda lost sight of the context.
Also, IIRC, passports are one of the harder and more expensive forms of ID to get.
Also, before dismissing the racism concerns around voter ID laws, it would be instructive to look at why this is so. The history of the US is steeped in race, and the concerns cannot be dismissed without understanding history.
If the US had a similar policy/attitude towards minorities & the historic prejudice they face, you probably wouldnt even have a debate around the racial implications of voting laws. The minority is expected to step up and do the effort even if it's unfair.
It is interesting that you said that history cannot be dismissed right after you basically dismissed the historical implications of French policies because... it's just the past and what happened before doesn't really matter?
To get an ID in USA: - Hope you still are in possession of the only copy of your birth-certificate. - If not, hope that your church/city-hall, can provide you a copy. - Go to the DMV, birth-certificate, two proof of residences. - Wait couple of weeks to receive by mail.
Things are much simpler in France, cost nothing, and because it is mandatory to have an ID, it is never an issue to provide one.
Do you live in the U.S. or do you just read about it online? I live in a historically Republican county that is suburban/rural. I needed a replacement copy of my son's birth certificate the other day. I went over to my county records office (which is 5 minutes away) and they gave me a copy in 30 minutes.
Waiting six weeks to get an ID in France? In my state your drivers license is delivered in under 10 days, typically just 4-5.
And Driving Licenses are not the same thing as an ID outside of North America. In France we have an CNI (ID), Passport, and Driving Licence as separate documents.
This is one of my pet peeves in D.C. and Ontario, I can not have an ID card if I have a driving license.
In the US, I haven't had a social security card for decades (it was in a wallet that was stolen) and I honestly don't know if I could unearth my birth certificate from my files someplace. But I do have a valid passport and drivers license so it doesn't really matter.
Most of the noise about ID cards is very politicized. Most adults have government-issued photo IDs; lots of things are very hard without them. And, for those who don't, by and large, they'd have problems rounding up the documentation to get one issued in most places. At the same time, there is essentially no evidence that voter fraud is a significant outcome of ID not being required.
Also are you completely not self aware?
"went over to my county records office" and "hope that your church/city-hall, can provide you a copy" - are literally the same thing. You just happen to live nearby the place where your birth certificate was recorded.
Let alone - low density areas, that are much more republican, also have easier access to government services.
OP was wrong about US birth certificates. They’re not recorded by “churches” they’re recorded by each state. My county office issues certified copies of Maryland birth certificates. (Yes you need to be born in the state, but most Americans live in the state they were born in, just like most Europeans live in the EU member country they were born in.)
It's literally the same process, you just get a card instead of a "book".
> They’re not recorded by “churches” they’re recorded by each state.
OP also used a slash.
Getting an ID being an issue is the real problem.
For example, you can't get an absentee ballot in Texas. Well, unless you are old and a likely Republican voter, then it's totally ok.
The US doesn't allow proxy voting in elections at all. Furthermore, it was banned to deliberately disenfranchise illiterate people in some cases:
>In Alabama, the Perry County Civic League's members' assisting illiterate voters by marking a ballot on their behalf was deemed "proxy voting" and "voting more than once" and thus held to be illegal.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proxy_voting#United_States
Talk about a false equivalence.