What I love about elections outside Northern Ireland is seeing how different jurisdictions do theirs differently – figuring out what works better in other countries and what lessons we could adopt to make our own more accessible and engaging for the public.

For the week that is in it, there are some lessons from the United States that we can and should learn from.

Yes, you read that right. The United States, with all the craziness of the recent election, does hold an advantage over us in one key area, and that is viewing their voting as a period, rather than merely just a day.

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Advance voting is something that many Americans have done in this election and previous ones. Images of queues of people voting were across our screens days before polls closed yesterday.

More than 70 million people took the opportunity to vote at a pre-poll centre or mail in their ballots for the........

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