You don’t get the day off, but it is on a weekday in winter; there’s no sausage sizzle; and, well, the loser might not accept the result. Elections in America are hard yakka.
Here is how they compare with Australia’s.
Timing
US presidential elections are held every four years and always in November – winter in the northern hemisphere. Specifically, they’re held on the Tuesday after the first Monday in November. In Australia, elections must be held on a Saturday, and they can be called any time within three years, on a date determined by the governor general, upon request by the government.
Any why Tuesday? In the early days of US elections, most Americans were farmers and Tuesday gave them enough time (one day each way) to travel to the polling stations and back. Saturdays and Sundays were excluded for religious reasons and Wednesdays were often market days.
Compulsory voting – and suppression
Voting in Australia is compulsory, and failing to vote is punishable with fines. In the US, as in most of the world, voting is not compulsory. In 2020, about two-thirds of eligible voters turned out for the presidential elections.
In Australia, in order to vote you must have registered. At the polling station, you are asked your name and address, your name is crossed off a list, and you are given a ballot paper. Polls open at 8am and close at 6pm. People can also vote early by postal vote.
In the US, you must also have registered and most states require voters to present ID when voters. There are often long queues, and some states have laws about these queues.
In 2021, Georgia Republicans enacted SB202, a bill with sweeping voting restrictions, including a ban on giving out food or water within 150ft of a polling place or within 25ft of any voter standing in a line – which could extend well beyond the 150ft radius. Violating it is a misdemeanour punishable by up to a year in prison and a $1,000 fine.
It can take hours to get to the front of the line in Georgia – some people waited 11 hours in the state in 2020 – and the measures were widely seen as an obvious attempt to make it harder for Black voters to cast a ballot.
Counting and results
Both Australians and Americans mostly vote on paper ballots, though there are some electronic voting machines in the US.
In Australia, the Australian Electoral Commission usually provides an indication of the count on election night. There isn’t an official result on the night, and indications of results – called by analysts and media, for example – depend on how close the count is.
In the US, unusually, the Associated Press news agency tallies votes and declares the winner, weeks before the official result. It has been done this way since 1848 because, the AP says: “Basically, no one wanted to wait for weeks to find out who won elections.”
They do this using more than 4,000 vote count reporters who report on the results, AP writes, “from inside the locations where ballots are actually counted, phoning in raw vote totals as soon as they are available. In all, there’s an AP vote count reporter at nearly every county election office in America on Election Day.”
Changing hands
In the US, the new president is inaugurated more than two months after the elections, on 20 January, or 21 January if 20 January falls on a Sunday.
In Australia it happens within days. In 2022, the Australian PM, Anthony Albanese, was sworn in on the Monday following the election on Saturday.
Seats in parliament vs electoral college votes
In Australia, voters vote for members of parliament – from a given party – and the party that wins the majority of seats in the House of Representatives, which has 151 seats, chooses who they want to be their leader and therefore the prime minister.
In the US, voters vote for a president and running mate, or a ticket – for example, Kamala Harris and Tim Walz or Donald Trump and JD Vance.
But they are actually voting for a group of people called electors, who cast the electoral college votes. The candidate who receives the most votes from the people in a state is, in most cases, the candidate who receives all of the electoral votes of that state.
The presidential nominee with more than half of the electoral college votes becomes the president of the United States. Different states have different numbers of electoral college votes, with the number decided based on the census.
Read more of the Guardian’s 2024 US election coverage:
US election 2024 live updates: latest polls, results and news
How the electoral college works
Lessons from the key swing states
What’s at stake in this election
