Works for me - I’m open to any or all of that. Can’t see how making election day a holiday doesn’t contribute positively to some extent, but I’m not married to the idea.
23% of non-government workers get no paid holidays, and of those that do, less than 25% get time off for some of them.
Restaurant and retail workers are still gonna be working. Ditto hospitality, leisure, medical and first responders, and tens of millions of others.
It applies to only a small proportion of people, and it doesn’t apply to the poorest people with the worst jobs and the least chance of having the option to get to the polls.
You want a real measure that would help? Require every workplace to allow workers as much time as in practice needed to go to the polls and vote, without either a financial penalty to them or a penalty in terms of being able to keep their job or of being treated worse on the job. If they can in practice make up the hours on another day, that’s fine; if not, they have to be paid anyway.
There’s no chance whatsoever of that passing. Mail-in voting, and early voting including on weekends, and long voting hours both for early voting and on Election Day: all of those would genuinely help.
Can’t explain it any clearer than I already have. If you can’t see the bias it introduces (or rather increases because that bias is already there), I can’t make you.
I’m perfectly happy to accept that rather than the bank holiday idea. Whatever works.
I think some people are taking the election day as holiday idea as my proposal to “solve” a problem. I don’t see voter participation as a problem that gets solved once and for all - we try to influence and change it. No issues for me at all accepting there are difficulties with the holiday idea. I’m not dogmatic on the subject, I just want to see more people voting.
This is the biggest reason I wonder about it. According to this map, the only states without early voting are Alabama, Mississippi, and New Hampshire.
https://www.ncsl.org/elections-and-campaigns/early-in-person-voting
Even here in Texas, with Ken Paxton (who recently sent law enforcement to raid LULAC offices for supposedly trying to register non-citizens to vote) as our attorney general, we have early voting from 10/21 through 11/1.
What are the days and hours?
The exact dates will vary year to year, but it’s always the 10 days from 14 days before the election through 4 days before the election. IIRC the hours are 8AM through 5PM.
It’s not going to happen. Too many people would throw a fit if their fast food becomes slow food on Election Day, and the grocery store and big boxes closed, because too many of the workers took off. And early and mail-in voting would also work, while being less generally disruptive.
Does that include Saturday and Sunday?
Because if not, it’s not helping the problem @Llama_Llogophile’s complaining about.
(Ours haven’t been posted yet; but IIRC Saturday and some evening hours were included.)
There are three levels to this. On the first level, it would be possible to set up an online voting system that is far more secure than anything we have right now. On the second level, though, despite good security being possible, a great many institutions and organizations, including many that really should know better, choose to implement lousy security anyway: All those news stories you read about password leaks and so on should never happen, at all. And on the third level, even if you did actually implement a good, secure online voting system, it’s not good enough for a voting system to be good: In order for a voting system to work, the people need to trust it, which means that you need to convince everyone that it’s good, and most people don’t and won’t have the math education to understand the security, and won’t trust anything they don’t understand.
That can’t work. There are some workplaces that absolutely need to be open 24/7, and there’s no way that you could keep those places fully staffed when every employee needs to take off a couple of hours on the same day.
What would and does work is to give voters a choice of when to vote. Nobody’s working 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Make “voting day” span from Saturday morning to Tuesday evening. Heck, make it all hours in that span, to accommodate folks working weird shifts: You probably won’t have many staffers in the wee hours, but you wouldn’t need many then, either.
Back to the original question, a fair distribution of polling places needs to take two things into consideration. First, nobody’s polling place should be too far away from where they live, and second, no polling place should need to accommodate too large a number of people. In rural areas, the first consideration will dominate, and the second will never even come close to being in play: If there’s a polling place within, say, 10 miles of every person, then each polling place will only be serving a small number of people. In a city, meanwhile, the second consideration will dominate: If you put in enough polling places to accommodate the population, then you’re going to have a heck of a lot of them, very close together. If you have some threshold number of acceptable polling place population, then urban areas will always be close to that threshold number (because if you’re not close, you have more than you need), but rural areas never will be, because they’re distance-limited instead.
I already said that. It won’t work even for the places that genuinely need to be open 24/7.
In the small towns, the difference between minimal staffing and usual staffing is likely to be next to nothing. You still need a couple of observers from both parties, which is about what we’ve got anyway. And sometimes have trouble getting.
Early voting with different hours on different days can help a good deal without requiring staffing 24/7 for four days straight.
It looks like it’s up to the county clerk for each county. Here in Nueces county early voting has been available on the Saturday and Sunday two weekends before the election going back to at least the 2008 election.
This is pretty much the law in NY - everyone is entitled to a four hour block of time in which to vote. If the employees has a regular work schedule that doesn’t allow for that ( say they work 8am to 6pm), they must be given up to two paid hours off at the beginning or end of the day in order to give them that four hour block. There are plenty of people/jobs it doesn’t affect because of the way their schedules work.
Thanks! I’m even in NY and didn’t realize that. Polls are open 6 AM to 9 PM; I was pretty startled when I realized that some states close their polls a lot earlier and my immediate reaction was “that doesn’t give some people who can’t get off work enough time to vote.”
Or organising elections so that it doesn’t take a couple of hours to vote.
Since we vote where we live, and some people don’t live near where they work, there will always be people who need a lot of time to vote.
That being said, i disagree with the premise that there are always long lines in cities. When i lived in Manhattan the lines were typically short, despite Manhattan using voting machines (which means the limiting factor on how fast voters are processed is the voter interacting with the singular machine. In places that use a paper ballot that you then slide into a ballot box, the limiting factor is the staff who check your eligibility and hand you the ballot.)
Manhattan had tiny voting districts, though. My polling place served four of them.
I am not sure it matters but most big cities have decent or even good mass transit. It is easier for people to find their way to a polling station than in the burbs or rural areas where you have to drive to go vote. Having more polling places closer to you in a rural area makes sense. Some counties are huge. If dems got in control in (say) Wyoming they could put one polling spot in Granger and make anyone from Creston drive over 100 miles (one way) to go vote.
Except that Democrats generally try to make voting easier. And if “dems got in power”, there would be enough Democrats in the state that this also served their self-interest. So no, i don’t think that’s a dynamic we’ll ever see.
I live where I work. I also live a fifteen minutes’ drive from the nearest village.
There are people in the country – even in NY State – who live considerably further from the nearest plausible polling place than that. Some of them also work from home, or otherwise not near their polling place. Outside of cities, that one is flat out unavoidable (except, of course, by mail-in.)
That currently seems more like Republican behavior.
Absolutely. I am not saying it would happen but, if turnabout is fair play, then that is what it would look like.
Sort of.
In Texas, one has to gather a petition of ten (IIRC) signatures requesting weekend early voting. The hill is not terribly high, but someone has to do it and probably most people don’t know that it needs to be done. IIRC, a second petition has to be collected requesting twelve hours of voting during the early period. That means the early-voting site is open 7:00am-7:00pm. If those petitions are completed, the weekend voting will take place on the weekend in the middle of the early voting period. There is no voting at all on the weekend preceding the General Election.