Imagine living in a city where following the rules on one side of the street could land you in jail on the other.
That's the case for residents of Bristol, Tennessee and Bristol, Virginia: two cities that share not only a name, but State Street, a main thoroughfare.
They have a common water supply, hospital and library, but have their own emergency services and city councils.
Former mayor of Bristol, Tennessee, Mark Hutton says the cities share an almost sibling-like connection.
"We're intensely loyal to one another when it comes to people trying to break us down, but we can scrap with the best of them when we need to," Hutton tells Annabel Crabb's Civic Duty.
Hutton lives in Tennessee but buys his groceries and cigars in Virginia, because it's cheaper due to lower sales tax. But he's quick to return to Tennessee to enjoy the theatre and nightlife.
"You want to have fun, you come to Tennessee," he says.
Bristol, Tennessee, boasts a larger population — an estimated 27,000 — while Bristol, Virginia, is home to an estimated 16,000 people, according to the United States Census Bureau.
The Bristol double-act has its perks for locals, who have learnt to navigate the unique set-up to their benefit, crossing the road to access specific services that are outlawed only metres away.
Beyond the administration quirks, life looks largely the same on either side of State Street. That is, until election time.
Hitting the polls in Bristol
That's when the cities' differing political ideas, and laws, really surface.
Sure, you can carry a gun into a Tennessee polling booth, but don't dare do the same in Virginia. It's against the law.
In Virginia, a ballot selfie is allowed, but in Tennessee, snapping a photo inside a polling location could land you a 30-day jail sentence.
Even the act of voting itself offers a different experience across the two cities.
In Virginia, take your pick between an electronic or paper ballot, but in Tennessee, election commissioners will make the decision for you.
"We were electronic for a while, and in 2022 we went back to a paper ballot," Hutton says.
Virginia has drop boxes for mail-in ballots, but across the border in Tennessee, you'll need to return your ballot through the post.
Political campaigning rules are slightly more lax in Virginia. In Tennessee, there's a 100-foot ban on ads from entrances to polling booths, whereas in Virginia, there's a 40-foot exclusion area.
"You can't leave your tent and walk with somebody to the door, you can't be handing out pamphlets or cards or anything like that. It's not really cool to yell at people as they're going in," Tennessean Hutton says.
Despite the quirks in the administration of elections, results from the 2024 US polls in the two Bristols painted a more unified picture.
In Sullivan County, which is home to Bristol, Tennessee, the Associated Press reports that President Donald Trump received 77 per cent of its votes. In Bristol County, Virginia, Trump received 69.5 per cent of the votes.
But zoom out and you'll spot a key difference in political ideals in the two states.
The state of Tennessee has voted Republican since 2000, and continued this trend in 2024, with Trump landing the majority of votes.
Meanwhile, Virginia continued its 17-year-long trend of voting Democrat, with Kamala Harris receiving 52.1 per cent of votes, according to the Associated Press.
Are the quirks of the US system here to stay?
The state-specific rules of the US' electoral system are an approach unfamiliar to most Australian voters, where all states administer elections in the same way.
But Hutton says some of the hallmarks of the Australian system, like compulsory and preferential voting, just wouldn't fly in the US.
"We kind of rebel from the start. There's still a lot of that within the American spirit, especially in this part of the country. There's a strong independent 'don't tell me what to do' sort of attitude," he says.
"I think it's a little bit of a swagger among the American people as a whole."
Hutton says a widely held distrust of government and politicians complicates the picture further.
"Change is hard, and changing a system in the United States, especially a political system, would be very difficult.
"I'm not saying we couldn't do it, but it would be very difficult."
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