The Scale Of The U.S. Election In Comparison

The U.S. presidential election has gone down to the wire yet again. With more than 200 million registered voters, it's a massive affair. Still, it's nowhere near the biggest exercise in democracy on the planet, an honor that goes to India. According to the Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance which maintains records of registered voters and turnout in elections across the world, 910.5 million people were registered to vote during the most recent Indian general election last year. Given that the number of Indians registered to vote is close to three times the size of the entire U.S. population, the event has to be spread out over a 6 week period across the country's 2 states and union territories with 91 constituencies. The process is a long one as a large number of officials need to be facilitated, security needs to be enacted and the contest's integrity needs to be upheld.

Indonesia is the world's third biggest democracy and its election is close to the U.S. in scale. During the 2019 contest, 192.9 million Indonesians were registered to vote with more than half of them aged 10 or under. Like in India, the Indonesian election is a very complex event, spread out over the 17,000 islands making up the country, encompassing 809,500 polling stations and a quarter of a million candidates battling for just over 20,500 seats. Unlike India, however, it all happens within a day, a rather frantic six hour period. The Brazilian election is split into two rounds and it follows Indonesia in terms of sheer size with nearly 147 million people registered to vote in October 2018 when Jair Bolsonaro was elected president. The contest also involved more than 1,600 posts while new governors were elected in all 27 states, along with 54 senators. Elsewhere, some of the world's largest elections can be found in Russia, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Japan who all hold huge contests with at least 100 million registered voters.