This is one of the pictures (original here) BBC is using to illustrate its election day coverage. It shows people in Washington lining up to vote. There's another perfect example of the genre on the Guardian illustrating a story headlined (appropriately enough) US voters queue to elect president.
So what's wrong with this picture? Simply that it shouldn't exist. The idea that people would have to queue for more than five minutes to vote in any advanced western democracy is absurd. The idea that they would be queuing out the door, for hours to do so is positively third-world. It speaks of an election apparatus so hideously underresourced that is simply not fit for purpose - unless the purpose is to stop people from voting rather than enable it.
Real democracies make voting easy, convenient, and quick. They have enough polling places. They have enough booths and/or voting machines. They have enough ballots, FFS. They have properly trained poll workers who can process people in a minimum of time, and clear standards for identification so things aren't held up by challenges and arguments. They let you vote anywhere, not just at the polling place you are assigned to. And the whole apparatus is predicated on the idea that everybody votes; it does not fall over if turnout is higher than the usual miserable 50%.
Every US election I have ever followed has been dogged by these problems. If they really want to call themselves the world's greatest democracy, they should fix them.
