Voting times

In the recent first round of elections in the French presidential election the voting times were from 8:00am up to 6:00pm, with a two-hour extension in the larger cities. For the United Kingdom general election in 2010, the voting times were from 7:00 in the morning until 10:00 at night. As for individual states in the US, there is no consistency in the poll times but 7:00-7:00/7:30 seems to be common.

Back in 2010 during the UK election, a significant amount of voters were turned away merely due to running out of time. As a potential solution to this problem, I think that voting should begin at midnight on election day and end at the subsequent midnight at the earliest. Having a minimum window of 24 hours helps give all the people who want to vote the time to do so, and even then the polls should only close when people stop turning up to vote: if there is a long line of people waiting to vote, they should be given the chance to rather than turned away because of an arbitrary time limit.

I recommend "midnight" as the opening for voting because if crowds of people frequently queue until then for a book release, a movie, or a concert, I think they will do the same when it comes to their votes. After all, while movies and concerts are valued as entertainment, people who do vote consider their votes to be highly important and they do not want to miss out. Giving them a greater amount of time gives everyone interested the opportunity. Evidently I do believe there should be some sort of a cut-off, as it would be ridiculous for someone to vote a week after the election, but no one should be turned away if they are already standing in line.

I do not think that any political party would be hurt if the voting times were extended in this way: for close races it would be helpful for as many people as possible to vote in case the outcome can be determined more clearly; and as for landslides, well, the victor merely receives an even greater amount of votes. The idea is only meant to ensure the best turnout possible, not to create a new method to rig an election.

This idea could be applied to any democracy, regardless of the size of the country. In fact, countries with larger geographic sizes and population would benefit from having more time for their people to vote.

I welcome any input on this solution to voting times.