Originally Posted by
racethenation
It is up to each locality to determine their polling hours. Here we are almost always 7am to 7pm. I saw on CNN this morning that there are a couple of small communities in New Hampshire that opened their polls at midnight.
It's one of the odd things about US elections, and probably the thing that creates the most problems, that although it's a federal election, each community has it's own particular way of managing the voting process. As a contrast, in Canada federal elections are managed by Elections Canada, although the Candidates names change for each riding, the rules that apply in one place, apply everywhere. That means if you need to show Photo ID in St. John's, NB then you need to show photo ID in Victoria, BC and all points in-between. Like I said, they tried staggering the hours a little this time, those on NF and Atlantic time closed at one point, those in Eastern (closed at 9:30), Central (closed 8:30) and Mountain (7:30) closed at the same time, and Pacific time closed at 7:30 PDT. I think they did this to prevent the old issue of, by the time polls close in BC, and it's legal for the media to broadcast results, the election was won or lost already. With this new timing, they are still counting results in Ontario and Quebec when BC comes online, so there is less of that.
A huge advantage we have in Canada is from the time an election begins until they are counting votes is roughly 6 weeks, the one we just completed was 37 days, mercifully short compared to the US system, which takes some 2 years and several sets of voting to get there.