It only takes India a month to set up a better election than the US.

The world’s biggest democracy has more than its fair share of problems, but getting out the vote isn’t one.

Despite India’s high illiteracy rate, and the lack of decent roads and home addresses, voter turnout in its last elections (in 2014) was 66%—higher than in many richer, more developed countries. Rates are expected to hover around those levels again in April during India’s upcoming general election, dubbed “the festival of democracy.”

This is the result of the Indian government’s determination to reach every single voter, no matter the practical challenges. Whether at the top of the Himalayas or in the middle of a forest, it ensures no one has to travel over 2 km (about 1.2 miles) to get to the polls. It even has a budget for elephants to carry machines to hard-to-reach areas.

SY Quraishi, who was India’s highest election official between 2010 and 2012, calls the massive endeavor “an undocumented wonder” in his 2014 book about running the world’s largest election—that’s actually its title. “I mean to diminish no individual, institution, or phase in our history when I say that India is valued the world over for a great many things, but for three over all others: The Taj Mahal, Mahatma Gandhi, India’s electoral democracy,” he writes.

To be sure, the Indian election is a thing of wonder. Its scale alone is mind-boggling: More than a million polling stations, 900 million voters, nearly 2,300 parties.

It is also an impressive work of democratic logistics that can teach a few lessons to the rest of the world, including countries with far more resources, like the US.

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