World reaction to long queues of voters in US

It's both amazing and terrible. Amazing to see people standing up for their rights and voting in the face of adversity, these voters deserve praise and are role models for the country.

Terrible because it means that they are in corrupt districts that are not properly facilitating democracy. Worthy of a federal corruption investigation potentially resulting in criminal charges. Though I am very glad people are willing to put in the time, it's a terrible thing that they are required to.

In Australia we have two things the US system desperately needs: mandatory voting and preferential voting.

Preferential voting allows you to vote for a third party without wasting your vote.

The standard argument against mandatory voting is people not wanting the uninformed to vote (trust me, they're voting) and the usual US predilection against that infringing "freedom". I was sympathetic to this until I saw the US system in practice.

Waiting for hours in line to vote is exactly why mandatory voting is better: optional voting encourages voter suppression. If you think one party doesn't make it harder to vote in areas where they have a disadvantage you're crazy.

Also, voting needs to be moved to the weekend. This makes finding venues easy: you use schools. This is what we do in Australia.

In Australia voting typically took me 5 minutes at most.

“Maybe you do not care much about the future of the Republican Party. You should. Conservatives will always be with us. If conservatives become convinced that they can not win democratically, they will not abandon conservatism. The will reject democracy.” ― David Frum, Trumpocracy: The Corruption of the American Republic

I've never voted for the POTUS and I expect I never will. From my POV I don't really care who wins but I think my preference leans to Trump. That has mostly to do with the Democrats being overly populistic about all the concerns, without offering any solutions. If you push through the endless barrage of misinformation from both sides, it does seem that the conservatives have a better understanding on how to progress the USA in a reasonable manner.

Unfortunately, in the online, and also in the educated world, this is an incredibly unpopular opinion. I've been labeled a racist, xenophobe, women-hater, and bigot so many times, it's a bit stale by now.

I'm pro-choice, I'm pro-guns, I love science, I think the Trump administration royally messed up the COVID-19 response, and I also think anyone in his stead would have done a terrible job (albeit slightly better from an advisory POV). Still, a Democratic POTUS wouldn't get any of the Republican voters to listen to them. So that would've ended in disaster as well.

Trump is a vile person. But from the two available options, he's the lesser of two evils. I've grown up being a left-wing ideologist and I consider myself a centrist today. It just took people like AOC to push me all the way over into the realm of, well, not falling victim to populist rhetoric that is based in the realm of fantasy.

By that I mean, of course, her ridiculous Green New Deal plan. Luckily a plan that Biden doesn't support, his one redeeming quality from the last debate.

I have never in my entire life waited longer than five minutes to vote in any election in a municipal, provincial or federal election. That includes early voting or election day voting. I walk over to a school near my house (or community center, or church) and vote. I can't understand how anyone in the US accepts the status quo of their terrible and flawed election system.

Make it a terrible experience, especially in lower income and minority communities, and you don't really have to worry about courting those people since many won't be willing, or able to vote.