This would be much more difficult to make anonymous (though not impossible), add quite a few middlemen, and prevent you from being sure your vote has actually been counted and not tampered with, though.

I like putting a piece of paper in a box very much (and elections are always on Sundays in France so you don't have to choose between this and your job).

In Washington State in the US the only way to vote AFAIK is by mail. You can go online and monitor your ballot through the processing steps after it's been dropped off.

Wait, this isn't universal in the US?

In Australia I went into a prepolling station and voted a week early.

Of course, compulsory voting definitely means things like these are required, but it never struck me that other countries wouldn't have the ability to prepoll

Absentee voting (vote-by-mail) is of course universal, as no politician would want to be the first one to say "we're not going to let active military servicemen vote". That would be political suicide.

Some States years ago opened-up absentee voting to literally everybody who simply asks for an absentee ballot. In some counties in those States, the percentage of people voting absentee was so high they just shut down the polling stations and have everybody vote absentee by default.

Now that said, we are the US, and that means we have this thing called "the South", and people in "the South" want to have strict controls over the polling process and require ID because that makes it easier for them to exclude people who have the "wrong" skin color from participating.

The US is a very large and very diverse country, and compared to European countries has very little central control when it comes to things like, for example, how elections are run. That's all State and county level.

>Now that said, we are the US, and that means we have this thing called "the South", and people in "the South" want to have strict controls over the polling process and require ID because that makes it easier for them to exclude people who have the "wrong" skin color from participating.

Is this you advocating for illegal inmigrant vote or are you saying that IDs are often denied to non-whites?

> Wait, this isn't universal in the US?

Anything that makes it logistically easier to vote is resisted in certain states because it would increase the turnout of poor and minority voters.

I agree, you /should/ be required to vote. It is fulfillment of your civic duty.

Though you should be free to submit a ballot of as little as a single mark (the mark being that you abstain from all contests on the ballot). If you vote in any single one you'd need to complete the rest, to ensure you ballot cannot be tampered with later.

In theory voting is compulsory. In practice it is compulsory to show up and get your name marked off. What you do after that in the little booth with just your conscious and a pen is up to you. (I usually take the pen, that's all I've ever got out of politics.)

> In theory voting is compulsory. In practice it is compulsory to show up and get your name marked off.

Since we have a secret ballot, it would be unenforceable for them to say that you had to submit a valid ballot.

> What you do after that in the little booth with just your conscious and a pen is up to you. (I usually take the pen, that's all I've ever got out of politics.)

Odd, my voting place last election only had pencils. I carried a pen with me (voting with a pencil is asking for trouble).

You can do that in Australia. To be fair, they call them "invalid" votes and they group your vote with other votes that are not correctly filled in. Since we have a secret ballot and compulsory voting, abstaining from a vote can be done by submitting a blank ballot.

There's no such thing as universal when it comes to elections in the US. Even during a "national" election, it's really thousands of elections held simultaneously by each of the counties.

Voting is a state issue, not a federal one. So, some states support and encourage voting by mail, some don't.

Oregon votes by mail, and I've generally been happy with it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vote-by-mail_in_Oregon

Agreed - simple, accurate, and allows lots of private time to read the ballot document and make decisions. I'm not sure why more states don't adopt vote by mail.

The problem with mail-in ballots is that they can be (and often are) mailed in well before all the facts of the election are there.