Early voting outside the US?

Is early voting allowed or common in Europe, Japan, etc. ?

As you may or may not know there are court battles over early voting in some places in the US. In general democrats favor early voting but the GOP does not.

It’s allowed and fairly common in Finland - in the last elections 31.9% of voters voted early. Used to be you were only supposed to vote in advance if you knew you weren’t able to vote on the actual day and you even needed to provide a reason but these days you can just vote early if that’s more convenient for you.

yes that is true in the US too. Our early voting is actually called “no excuse absentee voting” .

In Germany, postal voting up to four weeks before the actual election is possible since 1957 and is commonly practiced, with a share of postal votes of 24.3 % in the latest election for the Bundestag in 2013. I don’t remember it ever being a controversial subject, in my lifetime at least.

Oregon has “vote-by-mail” … we get our ballets sometime around the middle of October by USPS and can send them back right away again through the USPS. We could have a 100% early voting, although many wait until election day and just drop the ballets off at the various collection sites.

Our motto is “Vote early, vote often” …

Early voting is becoming more common in Canada. As in the Finnish example, it used to be that you had to give a good reason why you couldn’t vote at the regular poll, but advance polls on the weekends are more common and you don’t need a reason.

Not quite true, the way you’ve written it. Both parties favor early voting, it’s more a matter of exactly how much. (I’m unaware of any GOP led effort to eliminate early voting completely.) It would be more accurate to say that Democrats tend to favor expansive early voting, whereas Republicans favor more limited early voting.

In Canada, advance polls take place a week or two before the official voting day. You don’t need an excuse to use them; I’ve voted at the advance poll to beat the rush on occasion.

And the early voting in Quebec at least is generally on a weekend. Moreover, election day is a semi-holiday. Every employee is required to be given a four hour voting window during poll hours. McGill simply closes up at 4PM to comply.

GOP claims early voting is more prone to fraud so that’s why they want to restrict it as much as possible. They cut it back in NC along with trying to add the voter ID laws, but both have been stopped in court for now.

In the UK anyone can vote early by post, but not online. The main ‘fraud’ relating to postal votes seems to be where some ‘leader’ votes on behalf of their group (family/religious/ethnic). Papers are supposedly examined to reduce this.

About 1 voter in 3 votes before the election day in Australia, and the proportion is increasing. (Cite) There are two main kinds of early voting: postal voting (about 1 voter in 9), and voting in person at special polling places (about 2 voters in 9). It’s supposed to be for those who can’t vote on the election day, but in practice your reasons aren’t checked, and anyone can vote early.

this article covers the dispute over early voting here in NC

http://www.newsobserver.com/news/politics-government/election/article100979847.html

Here in Washington state voting by mail (or just dropping it in a box) is quite common. Ballots will be mailed out around October 21, so you can vote anytime after that.

Back in South Africa I believe early voting is very rare. I think there is a provision for overseas voters or people who will be out of the country on election day, but early voting isn’t generally available for convenience. Election day is a holiday which makes it a little easier.

Also in Colorado and Washington (as someone else pointed out). I wish more states would adopt this. I suspect it would actually decrease the amount of election fraud, but have nothing to back this up (so don’t ask for a cite).

The number of people who wait until the last day to drop their ballot off is rather large. I always do. I live only a mile or so from the county elections office, so I always bicycle over there on election day. They set up a convenient drive-thru location on that day.

Minnesota has an option allowing districts to choose entirely vote-by-mail, but the law specifically prohibits this in the urban areas, which vote mostly Democratic.

Early voting doesn’t exist at all in France (absentee voting doesn’t, either, in fact. If you have a valid reason preventing you from voting, you must pick someone to vote by proxy on your behalf).

Spain has no such thing; you can vote by mail and that has to be done in advance, but you can’t vote in advance at the voting station. But our voting days are always on Sunday… if we end up having a third parliamentary election this year, in theory it should be on December 25th because of the timing requirements. The politicians seem to be more worried about the date than about the fact that if we do go to a third election (we hadn’t ever even had a second one), people may just say “fuck this shit” no matter what day the vote is on.

In Ireland, you can register to vote by post if you’re in a particular occupation which is likely to take you away from home, or if you’re physically disabled, and maybe one or two other reasons. It’s very limited.

Residents of islands off the west coast go to the polls a day or two before the rest of us, as a precautionary measure due to the awful weather there.