Low voter turnout is very common in the USA. What if we required all businesses (except for media/ journalism and emergency services) to close, and give their employees the day off with pay? I imagine that this would bring far more voters in. Since nobody celebrates Columbus Day, if there is a debate about too many holidays, we could get rid of that.
That’s hundreds of millions of dollars worth of paid time off at the very minimum, if not billions. Who’s gonna pay for that?
The companies the employees work for.
One day, every two years. Wow, what a financial blow.
The polls are open for a long time and voting early is pretty easy.
I’d say low voter turnout is a consequence of the Electoral College. I take voting as a civic duty seriously, but if I lived in Texas I’m not sure I’d bother.
Just what we need: Another law, forcing businesses to do something that will cost them millions, with absolutely no measurable effect.
A better idea- voting in person available for a solid week, absentee ballots for anyone who wants one, elimination of voter ID requirements. I happen to get election day as a paid holiday but I’d vote even if I didn’t.
So you want to close the stock market, banks, and all associated financial businesses as well, I assume. My company supports our software customers 24/7 around the world, so we can’t close. If I were to get a paid day off I’d vote like I usually do first thing in the morning and go hiking, but lots of folks I know would just skip the voting part of that equation.
Why not just make absentee or vote-by-mail easier and save ourselves a ton of money and effort?
Let’s say I run a restaurant with 25 employees that makes about $20,000 gross per week. (Which I actually did once upon a time.) Let’s assume that all of those employees make the current minimum wage in my state - $9.32 per hour.
If I’m required to pay them all eight hours on Election Day (despite the fact that under normal circumstances probably a third to half of them would not be working on any given day), that’s an outlay of $1,864 on a day - nearly two-thirds a full day’s gross - for a return on my investment of $0. And when you consider that net profit after operating expenses is in the range of about 3% - I’ve just lost an entire three weeks worth of profit for the sake of giving employees a day off.
Of course, this is a moot point in my state, since our voting is done 100% by mail, which is much easier and much more cost-effective than shutting down the entire country for 24 hours. I hope none of those people rallying at campaign headquarters were planning on getting a bite to eat on their way home.
Our county went to all mail-in ballots. Very easy to vote. No problems.
My state allows early voting (up to a week before election day) at many polling places throughout the county. And on voting day itself, polls are open before and after the normal work day.
Having the ability to get to the polls is not the cause of low voter turnout. Voter apathy is a product of the majority of people in the country not being connected to how or why the government is run. More people just don’t care then we all realize.
IIRC, this already happens on every federal holiday, with no issues.
There are much cheaper ways to make it easier for people to vote. Absentee ballots. Early voting. Longer voting hours (very few people actually work so much that they can’t make it to the polls).
One suggestion was that we don’t need Columbus Day, so we could do Election Day instead. I’d be in favor of that, as long as we change Election Day to a Monday so I can continue to send in my absentee ballot and not lose a 3-day weekend.
It’s easy to be generous with other people’s money, isn’t it?
Horrible idea.
DC has adopted early voting. Beginning two weeks before election day, anyone can go to city hall (more or less). About 10 days out, anyone can go to a select number of community centers closer to their homes, which are open weekends and nights. This is in addition to traditional absentee ballots.
It isn’t free to the government to provide this early voting, but it relies heavily on volunteers to keep costs down; and overall if you want to vote in an election, everyone has ample opportunity to vote in a way that doesn’t involve shutting down the city and its businesses for a day.
I have that. In fact I signed up for it in perpetuity, so that I’ll always be sent one each election. It works really well and I support extending it to other locations.
I’m also allowed time off for voting, if it’s only a couple of hours. That wouldn’t work well for someone with a long commute, but I live two miles from my office.
Add vacation time to that and I have no one to blame but myself if I don’t vote.
That said, last election there were five judges to be ratified, and votes for six positions on various community college or school district boards. I knew nothing about any of those people, beyond their essays and current job titles, and most of those were pretty bland. The judges didn’t bother.
There were blanks on my ballot. I voted for the State positions, even things like Treasurer, and for City Councilmembers. I slogged through all the propositions. I think there were about eight. But for the judge and board and school district positions, there were a lot of blanks.
No, because there are other alternatives to voting on Tuesday. Most years I do early voting in the weeks leading up to the election. This year was the first Tuesday vote I’ve done in a long time. We had been out of town and I wasn’t able to get to an early voting location before we left. But in my case it was pretty easy. I only had to wait a few minutes.
If they gave the day off, I think it may lead to even less turnout. People may use the time for an actual vacation day and not vote at all.
This. My state has mail-in voting, too. It’s not a matter of voting being too inconvenient. As Omar Little said, many voters just don’t give a shit, especially when it comes to voting for governors or Congresscritters. Most people only vote during Presidential elections, if at all.
Well, that certainly explains Farm and Oil subsidies and military spending…
While I like the idea of encouraging people to vote, there ain’t no way in hell mandatory paid time off would be accepted- and even if it were, companies would *immediately *start finding ways around it.
Mail-in ballots are the best way to go. It’s already working in Oregon, and has been for years. It’s *easy *to vote there. Of course, there are some factions in the government who want to make it as hard to vote as possible…
In addition to everything everyone else has said, I honestly think it would do more to encourage voting if companies would allow their employees to come in a bit late or leave a bit early than if they gave them the whole day off. Why does it take a whole day to cast a vote?
Instead of the whole day off you could determine a reasonable length of time for voting and legislate to ensure that employees must be given that time off.
In Canada, by law, employees must be given 3 consecutive hours to vote. If polls are open from 830am to 830pm and your shift runs from 11am to 7pm then your employer must give you time off with pay to vote. It is the employers choice as to when they provide the time off (1/2 hour at the beginning of the shift, 1 1/2 hours at the end or 3 hours in the middle) allowing them to accommodate their business needs.