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I just checked, France has 70000 polling stations and 280000 volunteers for each election, so it’s rather 0.4% of the population.

We just had presidential elections and are electing representatives for parlement next week, we had local elections in 2020, nation-wide elections are not that rare.

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Similar to Australia. We have mandatory voting, with paid staff, most being hired just before elections, and from my experience working there, it is well organised, with plenty of redundancy, in case of challenges and recounts.

I love the mandatory voting. Back the day I barely ever voted, that did change. Mainly because I saw political parties rise that I fundamentaly disagree with, meaning that the outcome all of a sudden actually did make a difference for me.

Having mandatory voting would mean that non votes don't screw up the results when one side manages to mobilize morw voters than others. And intentionally voting blank actually sends a pretty strong signal.

Yeah the volunteers you’re talking about here are the all-day (7am to 9-10pm!) volunteers, not the counting people who come for just the evening the day of the vote. They outnumber volunteers by a factor of 3-5 where I am.

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