You know, I used to think that making Election Day a national holiday would be a great thing- get people interested in voting (“Oh? I get today off? It’s Election Day? Jeez, I should go vote.”), and also allow people more opportunity to actually get off their butts and go to the polls.
However, just a few weeks ago I remembered that the busiest times of my life, when I was working retail, were the days that everyone had off. Owners of some types of business make more money on holidays, because people are bored. The two single busiest days for movie theaters are Thanksgiving Day and Christmas Day- and when I worked in a theater, we were always paid slightly more to work those days. I never got to see my family over the holidays, 'cause I was always working. It wasn’t until I got out of the retail section that I started having real holidays.
I think that making Election Day a national holiday would end up making it harder for lower-income citizens to vote, not easier.
In Argentina election day is a holiday… but then again every election happens on a sunday.
The reason why election happens on sunday is the fact that you have to vote in the nearest school (public or private), and because of that it has to be empty of students.
Election day as a holiday is moot if, as happened to a lot of people who went to vote this year in both primaries and the general election, you still spend hours and hours in a line to vote. Yes, it would save (some) people from working and standing in a line, but if people’s perspective of voting is that it is a long, boring, painful chore, it’s not going to matter much.
Early, no-excuses, voting. In person or by mail. And eventually online. That’s what we need, and what we should be pushing for. Yes, I know that people in some countries start lining up to vote days before and wait 10 hours in the hot, beating sun in order to exercise their democratic rights.
To be frank, there’s a reason why most of us don’t live in places like that.
The importance of the act of voting does not have to be underscored nor demonstrated by physical sacrifice. And as our population ages, it is going to become less possible for many Americans to continue to face the idea of standing in freezing cold weather, snow, rain, etc. for who knows how long, for a process that takes only a few minutes. (And that’s not even touching the issue of polling places in inaccessible buildings.)
Not that I am arguing for it, but it is far easier to prevent fraud with the election day only/ precient system.
With the traditional system, there are thousands of locations where only a couple of hundred people are eligible to vote in each, for a 12 hour period on one day. Pretty difficult for a scammer to change an election.
An early voting station open for two weeks and open to anyone in the county/sometimes state? Easy(er) pickings…
And yet that’s pretty much exactly what happened this time. Quite a few states had sizeable majorities of the vote in early, and I think almost every state had at least a significant percentage.