What I love about elections outside Northern Ireland is seeing how different jurisdictions do theirs differently – figuring out what works better in other countries and what lessons we could adopt to make our own more accessible and engaging for the public.
For the week that is in it, there are some lessons from the United States that we can and should learn from.
Yes, you read that right. The United States, with all the craziness of the recent election, does hold an advantage over us in one key area, and that is viewing their voting as a period, rather than merely just a day.
♦ Subscriber Exclusive: Ask columnist Tom Kelly a question
Advance voting is something that many Americans have done in this election and previous ones. Images of queues of people voting were across our screens days before polls closed yesterday.
More than 70 million people took the opportunity to vote at a pre-poll centre or mail in their ballots for the presidential election. This is not something that is just a carry-over from the pandemic – for many election cycles, millions of Americans have utilised this option that makes voting something that happens on more than just a single day.
The idea of advance voting is not unique to the United States; countries like New Zealand have adopted it with interesting results. Since 2011, when it was introduced, the number of people taking this option has grown in every general election, with more than one million people casting an advance vote last year.
Similarly, the most recent provincial election in British Columbia set a new record for the number of people taking up the option to vote early.
Across the world, election after election shows an appetite from the public to make voting more than just a single-day event.
When we headed to the polls earlier this year, I heard constant stories about being away on holiday and not taking the option to get a proxy or postal vote. Imagine if we had the same approach as New Zealand, where we gave people the option of casting a vote two weeks before election day itself.
I know there are sceptics of this approach. But you must ask what there is to fear by making voting more accessible. Given the situation we had in July, where holidays became such a big issue for many people, is it not prudent to allow people more options for voting early?
Yes, issues can arise during early voting, where maybe some people have already voted and a big story breaks, but this is also the case with people casting postal votes.
And let’s face it: issues that were not properly discussed throughout the campaign can arise in the days after polling day. A good example in our local context was the DUP refusing to nominate a Speaker in the aftermath of the 2022 Assembly election.
It has become the norm in country after country where this has been implemented. It has the potential to improve our campaigns, meaning policies get launched earlier, which could allow more time for scrutiny and analysis of what candidates will do when they get elected.
Today, we will see a lot of commentary about the negatives of the US electoral system, and I would echo many of these criticisms. However, there are things in their electoral process that they have got right, and we should look to bring these forward here.
As politics and the ways the public engages with it change, so should our voting system. We should not be afraid to look across the pond and learn the lessons, both good and bad.
The bad is that we treat politics and government as if they are extensions of reality TV shows, where it does not matter who wins, just so long as we are entertained in the process.
This is where I point out that advance voting is not a silver bullet for solving a democratic deficit, but can be part of a bigger solution.
As a marathon year of elections comes to an end and we look into a two-year period locally with none on the horizon, we should be thinking about how we can broaden our own democracy at home.