an hour? I guess we Brits just don't understand the "most advanced democracy in the world".


In Hammersmith (London W6), it would have been: "Got in 8.02, left 8.06, after a chat with the organiser from my favourite party."

Anon,


There are many reasons to wonder about the "most advanced democracy in the world."



I waited an hour, but many waited and will wait far longer.



By the way, we also used electronic voting machines that have a sot of paper trail but I am rather wary of these things being manipulated.



Then you have the electoral college. All in all, it is not ideal and far from the "most advanced."



Just my opinion.



Edward

Not to worry. Thanks to the "special relationship" the UK has in the past adopted American approaches in many other aspects of government: wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, deregulation of banking, ignoring the housing bubble, encouraging consumer debt, etc. It is only a matter of time before the electoral process gets carved up among a bunch of private companies pushing expensive unreliable insecure opaque error-prone electronic voting systems.

in the state of maryland where I live they are actually getting rid of those electronic voting systems.


As far as special interests go, I think Americans are fed up with the corporatism of th U.S. government. Let's see what happens in Obama's first 100 days before we can assess what his election means about that.



But, as far as the Brits go, I imagine they are happy about the election because they were starting to push back against the U.S. Gordon Brown has proven a much more independent-minded PM than his predecessor.