I voted in the Victorian state election on Monday (no credit, it’s compulsory) but the election itself isn’t until the weekend, the polling place has been open all week and practically empty besides the people working there so you can just waltz in any old time and to the business without doing anything barbaric like waiting in a goddamn line.
except of course if something dramatic happens tomorrow and I happened to want to change my vote well obviously I couldn’t, I’ve already voted! and conversely I could have just as well placed my vote a month ago, I don’t think it has changed since then, so keeping the polling place open for one (1) week before the election is a fairly arbitrary choice – why not allow you to vote any time, more than once?
this would immediately present a problem for secret ballots: the reason I can’t change my vote is that it’s not linked to my name, so repeated voting would be cumulative, but this should be easy to fix if my vote is stored under an opaque hash and the link between that hash and my identity is stored elsewhere, much like the way postal votes are mailed in a double envelope so that the identity can be separate from the ballot.
at that point there would be little need for elections as such and even less need for polling as you could change your vote at any time, and it would open up possibilities for more experiments with liquid democracy and more fine grained representation.