It depends on where you are—as I realized reading a comment subthread on Overcoming Bias which I can’t think of a good way of googling for. (People discussing this seem to be always Generalizing From One Example.) Where I am, I had to register once and for all (before the first election in which I was eligible to vote), and it takes less than half an hour to walk to the polling station, queue, vote, and walk back home—and it’s usually on Sunday afternoon during the early summer, when if I stayed home I’d most likely just waste my time on TVTropes or something
(Now, if among people voting in the same election going to the poll station and queuing would be a much greater inconvenience for some than for others, that would be pretty bad as it could introduce biases. Does that happen?)
No matter what, voting will be more inconvenient for some people than others. E.g. in your example, people that go to church on Sunday afternoon, maybe? Certainly people that work weekends in the summer, although they can probably still take a lunch break to vote.
It probably doesn’t matter too much. But in a close election, if even an additional 1% of people that have to work weekends chose not to vote (and these tend to be a specific class of jobs that probably are biased towards one candidate), that could change the outcome.
IIRC, elections in Italy are usually Sunday all day (from 7 a.m. to 10 p.m.) plus Monday morning (from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m.), or Saturday afternoon plus Sunday all day. I think the main group of people it biases against is those who like to go to the seaside for the weekend as soon as they can—almost all people who stay in town could find some time to vote if they want to. OTOH, plenty of people (including) don’t switch their legal residence when they rent an apartment to study in another town, so they’d have to go back to their parents’ in order to vote. I study relatively close to where I grew up and my parents live so I go back home most weekends anyway, but students living further away from their home towns might be under-represented among voters. (I hear they can get free train tickets for that, though. I’ve never bothered to do that because train tickets from my home town to my university town and back are so cheap anyway.)
It depends on where you are—as I realized reading a comment subthread on Overcoming Bias which I can’t think of a good way of googling for. (People discussing this seem to be always Generalizing From One Example.) Where I am, I had to register once and for all (before the first election in which I was eligible to vote), and it takes less than half an hour to walk to the polling station, queue, vote, and walk back home—and it’s usually on Sunday afternoon during the early summer, when if I stayed home I’d most likely just waste my time on TVTropes or something
(Now, if among people voting in the same election going to the poll station and queuing would be a much greater inconvenience for some than for others, that would be pretty bad as it could introduce biases. Does that happen?)
No matter what, voting will be more inconvenient for some people than others. E.g. in your example, people that go to church on Sunday afternoon, maybe? Certainly people that work weekends in the summer, although they can probably still take a lunch break to vote.
It probably doesn’t matter too much. But in a close election, if even an additional 1% of people that have to work weekends chose not to vote (and these tend to be a specific class of jobs that probably are biased towards one candidate), that could change the outcome.
IIRC, elections in Italy are usually Sunday all day (from 7 a.m. to 10 p.m.) plus Monday morning (from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m.), or Saturday afternoon plus Sunday all day. I think the main group of people it biases against is those who like to go to the seaside for the weekend as soon as they can—almost all people who stay in town could find some time to vote if they want to. OTOH, plenty of people (including) don’t switch their legal residence when they rent an apartment to study in another town, so they’d have to go back to their parents’ in order to vote. I study relatively close to where I grew up and my parents live so I go back home most weekends anyway, but students living further away from their home towns might be under-represented among voters. (I hear they can get free train tickets for that, though. I’ve never bothered to do that because train tickets from my home town to my university town and back are so cheap anyway.)