Me: Ireland - Approximately 2 minutes until poll in hand is the longest.
I’ve been seeing long lines for the US elections even for early voting. Seems completely unnecessary.
Houston, Texas. 4.5 hours
The lines are intentional to discourage you from voting
North Houston Suburbs, no more than 20 minutes.
ditto when i moved to austin.
anecdotally: the length of the lines correlate with the wealth of the voting district. i think that texas is like arizona & georgia in that when the lines are long; they’re REALLY long compared to the long lines i experienced in california, new york, & illinois; but the short line places always seemed to be much emptier on election day for some reason.
GOOD GOD!!!
Fwiw it was less than 10 mins in the affluent neighborhoods I lived near San Francisco, California and New York and 1.5 hours in the poor neighborhoods in those same cities
That’s an interesting one. I live in a small town (~10K). It’s a fairly middle-class suburb of Dublin and the only place I’ve ever voted (but many times). Makes me curious if it’s different in other neighbourhoods.
i’ve lived in 11 cities in this country over the decades chasing work to maintain my health insurance and my experienced seemed normal to my neighbors who had lived there most of their lives as well.
most of those cities had a large proportion of transplants like me and their experiences mirrored mine.
~1 minute here in Austria, usually it takes longer to find the right room than to wait in line when I’ve found it
Oregon here 0 minutes. My ballot is delivered in the mail and I can drop it off at the post office or ballot drop box.
Colorado, same. I voted 3 weeks ago.
Somewhere between suburban and rural Pennsylvania here. I think it was about 2 hours the time voted for Obama’s second term. Another presidential election was about an hour. Presidental elections have lines outside of work hours because nobody gets off to vote. Non-presidential elections are a few minutes to maybe a half hour tops.
I’m so glad they didn’t get rid of early voting after COVID, but I wish the drop boxes were around for more than a few hours on 2 weekends. I like dropping it off rather than trusting the mail, but they’re only open 8-5 on weekdays and 10-2 on the last 2 weekends.
US- Wife went 30 minutes after polls opened and ended up waiting an hour today. New location for us, so don’t know if this is normal here. I’ll edit later with my experience.
10 minutes, from leaving home to getting back to home, by foot. I have always had a polling place withing walking distance, and have never seen a line more than a few people.
I lived in a city of 25,000 people, a city of 200,000 people, and a city of 10,000 people, all in western NY.
I always vote before 8am.
I remember rushing home, changing out of my uniform and jumping in line at the local library… and I stood there for like 4-6 hours in the freezing cold. Rosario Dawson, the actress, actually came by with donuts, back before the republicans outlawed providing food and water to people in voting lines. I actually took a picture of my wife with her, she was so kind. My wife and I were taking turns hiding in the car to stay warm, and saving a place in line. I couldn’t believe how cold and how long the line was. The shitty thing was that it was also extremely windy, the cold bit hard.
This was Atlanta, GA probably for the Biden/Trump election in 2020. I’ve voted early ever since, I walk in and out within like 15 minutes now. I’m not doing 4-6 hour lines ever again.
Edit: poll workers actually came out and designated someone as the last voter, and we stayed in line well past the normal close time. But, they had to get the last person who showed up before close.
poll workers actually came out and designated someone as the last voter
I did wonder about this. That’s cool to know and seems like a fair way to run it if you’re in the line before the station closes. Thanks for the insight.
Awesome about Rosario Dawson too!
The shitty thing is, the long lines are by design. Election officials are regularly closing polling locations in inner cities because ‘they don’t have the funding to keep so many open’, when the state government chooses not to fund them. Rural areas have always had quick in-and-out voting merely due to how many people they’re providing for. While increasing the wait times at inner city polling places causes some voters to either not get the chance to vote because either they’re not allowed to at some point, or the extra votes aren’t sent up because they were too late… or it causes people to go home instead of wait in the freezing cold ass line for 4-6 hours. Some people were complaining about 8 hour lines that year.
They cheat to win however they can.
England - never been a line. The only thing I’ve ever had to wait for is for the bod manning the polling station to find my name on the list and hand me a voting slip. In and out in a couple of minutes.
Probably 5 minutes or so. 10 if I include the time spent driving there. Usually it’s quiet enough that it’s not waiting in line but rather waiting to have everything sorted out.
Maybe 5 minutes in Germany
15 mins in AU. I thought I’d try to get it over and done with in the morning… so did everyone else.
10 or so minutes once, I came there at the busiest time. Czechia.
Voting for any French election while in Montréal (Québec, Canada) is usually a 3-4 hours wait line
40 minutes, once, in 2015, Canada.
Usually, 2-5 minutes.
Four hours, NYC, early voting in 2020. This year it went a lot faster.
