The sad thing is that this is all happening in the US which should pride itself on its democratic institutions. Yet here in the UK ( and most of Western Europe, ) the government takes a pride in providing a good voting system which is fair and easy for everyone to use. Every village and suburb is provided with one or more polling stations, well staffed and organized by mainly citizen volunteers.

If people could not get postal votes, or lines formed outside the polling stations, even short ones long enough to stop some people getting in, it would be regarded as a great national shame. Public questions would be raised in the press and parliament, if just one short line formed in, say Little Puddling village. And Little Puddling, which no one had ever heard of before, would be on the front page of every newspaper. While if lines formed so long that people needed water handed out, or there was even a question of people having to spend their own money on helping others get to the polling stations, the whole election would be declared invalid, and would have to be run again. Sure the UK is not perfect and we still have many undemocratic institutions, though they are mainly disenpowered. But heck even some near dictatorships with only sham democracies, can make a better fist of running fair elections than that.

I know that for many years the US was the worlds leading democracy, but complacency is a dangerous friend in a changing world. The rest of the free world has been moving forward for a long time, it is badly out of step trying to run a democracy in the twenty first century, by failing even to properly meet standards laid down in seventeen eighty seven.