Is it time to make Election Day a federal holiday? 🗳️ Some say it would boost voter turnout and align the U.S. with other democracies, while others argue it could create challenges for hourly workers and cost millions. Dive into the debate over whether a federal voting holiday is the best way to strengthen democracy or if there are better solutions. Check out the full breakdown!
All of those drawbacks are bullshit.
Early voting and mail in ballots should be more available to everyone. That’s not a reason not to make it a holiday.
Private employers can’t be forced to observe a holiday. That’s not a reason not to make it a holiday. People required to work could still go before or after work, and would see reduced wait times because public employees would be able to go during work hours.
Finding childcare for the day is a problem anyway, as polling places are often schools, and the kids are sent home anyway. If it was a holiday, you could take your kids with you to the polls and then go to the park. That’s almost a reason not to make it a holiday, but not really.
If banks, post offices, and schools are all closed, a lot of businesses will also close because work slows down. Other employers, like retailers, food service, and entertainment venues like movie theaters would all see an uptick in business, and would probably offer extra pay for those shifts.
Yes to mail in ballots. Yes to early voting. Yes to a national election holiday. Reduce the barriers to voting. No to ID laws. No to voter roll purges. No to proof of citizenship requirements.
Over here all employers have to give employees 4h to vote. So if it’s open from 8 to 8 and you work from 8 to 4 they don’t have to give you time off, but if you work 8 to 6 they have to cut your shift at 4 instead.
That’s a good system. Let’s do that.
I live overseas so I’m eligible for an absentee ballot.
I filled it out and submitted it a few weeks ago.
It was all done through the government website for my state and email.
Couldn’t be easier.
Everyone should be eligible for mail in or early voting.
ID and citizenship requirements seem like pretty basic requisites to voting, what’s wrong with those?
Inconsistent access and inconsistent standards, for the most part.
A classic example is how certain states (Texas, for instance) will assert that gun licenses qualify as a valid ID but state university student IDs will not. Another is in how IDs - like driver’s licenses - have a fee associated with registration and renewal, which amounts to a poll tax. A third is that citizenship isn’t necessarily a prerequisite for voting in municipal and state elections. So requiring someone to be a citizen before accessing a ballot becomes an unconstitutional burden at the state and local level.
Then there’s the fact that we already have a voter id system. It’s called your voter registration card. You typically get one after you’ve registered to vote in your municipality. The fight over voter ID is that you need a second piece of identification on top of the registration card.
Broadly speaking, if everyone was afforded equal access to a single uniform ID document at no cost, there wouldn’t be a problem. But so much of the Voter ID rules don’t establish homogeneous ID requirements. Implementation is left up to the states. So states with a history of hostility towards democratic rule can back-door disenfranchisement into the process of obtaining these documents.
There is currently no voter registration card where I’m from. All you have to do is say your name and they check you off. If you aren’t registered in the area, you can bring a piece of mail with your name and address to prove you live in that precinct, or someone to vouch for you, then you are given a ballot and they add you to the registration for next time. But yes it sounds like there is a lot of variation in how states implement or assure the integrity of their elections, and all of them are prone to certain kinds of abuse, whether it’s discouraging voters or vote harvesting or some other illegal mechanism for influencing elections in favor of the established powers.
Because not everyone has an ID or proof that they are a citizen, and in the United States, you’re presumed innocent until proven guilty. When you register to vote, you fill out a form stating you are a citizen and elligible to vote. There are existing mechanisms to check that voters are eligible. If you lie or commit fraud, those are crimes. There’s a paper trail, and if it were an actual problem, there would be proof that it’s happening.
Homeless people have the right to vote. Forgetful and disorganized people have the right to vote. Hermits and people who survive house fires have the right to vote. ID requirements or requiring proof of citizenship creates an unnecessary barrier that disenfranchises more legal voter than the illegal votes it prevents. Because that’s the point of them, they want to stop legal voters from voting.
But you can’t ignore very real problems with increasing the pool of ignorant voters, since whoever has the most access to that pool will have an advantage because these ignorant voters can be taken advantage of simply because they are ignorant. Should people be voting if they don’t know how the system works or what the candidates even stand for? If you can’t be bothered to care about it enough to go through minimal requirements, do we need to go out of our way to shove a ballot in their hands?
And yes, I acknowledge that the kind of thinking I outlined above can be used to repress voters as well. I guess my point is that these policies cut both ways. It’s not such a clear cut answer as “give everyone a ballot”, because that can (and has) very very easily turn into “give them a ballot and suggest who they should vote for”.
Yes, because ensuring everyone can vote is how I know I will always be able to vote. Democracy is about self-determination. There is no competency requirement for people making decisions for themselves.
Now, if you told me we were going to have competency requirements for candidates, thats something I might support, depending on how it’s implemented.
Benefits: People get to exercise their constitutional right to participate in democracy without sacrificing their livelihood
Drawbacks: None
Drawbacks: Stockholders don’t like it when the slaves don’t work
Pissing off stockholders is a benefit
I’m all for it as long as bars, restaurants, grocery stores, and shops close down too. Fast food workers and the like shouldn’t have to show up to work when everyone else gets the day off to vote.
This could be easily solved if we simply allowed voting to go on for a week, and mandated that every business must give every employee a day off during that week to go vote. Hell, it could be a month if we wanted. The only reasons to limit voting to a single day are malicious ones.
Yet they’re perfectly willing to shut the entire fucking government down willy-nilly because they didn’t get some piece of pork barrel spending they promised their megadonors. Fucking buffoons.
Many argue that advocates should redirect their efforts to create early voting options
Additionally, opponents emphasize that private employers are not required to recognize or give paid time off for federal holidays.
Both arguments against it are whataboutist horseshit. Anyone claiming these as reasons not to also make it a holiday would almost certainly also be against “okay, let’s do all three”, because they are arguing in bad faith.
No. All that needs to be done is make universal vote by mail the standard.
My state has been doing it for 24 years now, this will be the 7th Presidential election (2000, 4, 8, 12, 16, 20, 24) and 13th Congressional election. It works, it increases voter participation, there’s a built in paper trail, there’s nothing to not like about it.
Remember how 2014 had a record low turnout for a mid-term election?
"the lowest it’s been in any election cycle since World War II, according to early projections by the United States Election Project.
Just 36.4 percent of the voting-eligible population cast ballots as of last Tuesday, continuing a steady decline in midterm voter participation that has spanned several decades. The results are dismal, but not surprising – participation has been dropping since the 1964 election, when voter turnout was at nearly 49 percent."
Meanwhile, in my state:
https://www.oregonlive.com/politics/2014/11/voter_turnout_of_695_percent_i.html
"Turnout in this fall’s election reached 69.5 percent, just half a percent short of turnout in 2010 and 2006 and 1.5 percent better than in 2002, Secretary of State Kate Brown said Wednesday.
More than 1.5 million Oregonians cast ballots, a record high for a non-presidential election, while nearly 700,000 registered voters sat out."
The military has allowed it since the civil war.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/debate-over-mail-voting-dates-back-civil-war-180976091/
Same way for Colorado. It’s all the benefit of electronic voting, but with the added safety of paper ballots. And it’s a format we’re all familiar with from school – bubble in our answer (just with a pen instead of a number 2 pencil), and then turn it in. The counters feed the ballots into the counting machine, which tallies up the votes, then the ballots are stored in nice boxes, which can be retrieved and hand-counted on the off-chance the machines get hacked or otherwise…tampered with (Tina Peters, I’m looking at YOU…as you go to jail for 9 years! :3).
“Those against making Election Day a federal holiday argue that such a large focus on one day is misguided, since almost 70% of ballots in the 2020 presidential election were cast before Election Day.”
___These are the same people that think that more testing will make the number of COVID cases go up.
Additionally, opponents emphasize that private employers are not required to recognize or give paid time off for federal holidays.
lol “we shouldn’t fix this fucked up thing because this other thing is also fucked up”
that’s a you problem, dog
And the solution is right there in the sentence.
Exactly.
The solution here should be the federal government going, “Ooh! Good catch on that! Here’s a law mandating that private employers give paid holidays for all federal holidays! Thanks for looking out for employees!”
And if not all, at least for the arguably most important day of all in the self declared bastion of democracy.
Easier solution than trying to have a single day off for everyone:
Since early voting is a thing, all employers should be required to give workers 1 paid flex day during voting season so they can vote.
They can even tie the flex day to evidence that they actually voted, so it truly encourages voting instead of just being an extra day off.
How are you going to have evidence of voting?
Everyone that votes gets some variant of “i voted” sticker already, that changes every where, sooooo…
I’ve only ever gotten a sticker twice…plus you can buy rolls of them online.
As it is, they record who votes. It’s how you can have multiple polling locations avaialbe but can only vote once.
It’s not a huge leap from that to being able to prove to your employer that you voted.
Unless the day off can only be used on voting day I think people will use it for their own purposes.
So many things to fix about our broken democratic institutions. Every state should have mail-in voting as well as early voting. Every state should automate the registration of voters as much as possible as well. And sure, election day should be a federal holiday, or moved to Sunday or Saturday, at least.
Other things to work on: ranked choice voting and getting rid of the nasty racist holdover that is the EC. Also, we need to remove the special privileges that rural land has over people. Way too many ways our current system gives remote areas more representation than they should have…
Good points except for Ranked Choice. That archaic voting system is a sort of poison pill.
It doesn’t actually solve any of the problems proponents claim it does, and it adds complexity and additional points of failure. It was designed in 1788, but rejected for use in France at the time due to the habit of eliminating the Condorcet winner. (The person who would win in a one on one election vs all other candidates)
The bad idea was then reinvented in the early 1800s as the Single Transferrable Vote, with no fixes for that pesky Condorcet issue.
No, the way to go is either the simplicity of Approval, or the more granular STAR. (STAR is the new hotness, designed this century, with the pitfalls of past systems in mind)
Both systems are completely immune to the Spoiler effect while also allowing, or even encouraging the growth of third parties.
Opponents counter that a holiday may not significantly increase turnout and could even create challenges for some workers.
Ok well can we collectively agree that the opponents to this are full of shit? Like, this is less than a no brainer. This is a negative brainer. In that to oppose a national election day holiday, your aim must be less people voting. There’s one party that does well when less working people vote, and surprise surprise, it’s the party that keeps denying us a federal election day holiday. GEE, I CAN’T IMAGINE WHY.
Trump said this week of Democratic voting proposals. “They had things, levels of voting that if you’d ever agreed to it, you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.”
From a 2020 Vanity Fair Article, discussing how Democrats wanted to make it easier/safer for people to vote during the pandemic.
The only reason to not make voting day a holiday is because the very people preferring you not vote are losing profits and power don’t want the people worked the hardest to have a say in changing the system.
Yes, and I also want a hotdog after voting (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_sausage).
Now that’s a fantastic idea. How about options? Democracy grilled cheese? Democracy pizza? All food trucks get a fixed tax break to serve a single free food item pp at polling places on voting days! Basically paid advertising.
edit: Democracy TACOS!!!
I’m gonna need to go lobby now… or at least do some market research…
Make voting take a week and limit campaigning to 90 days before the end of that week.
It should be
Presidential elections occur on leap years where we just plain add an additional day to the year on our calendar. This isn’t as complex an issue as the article wants it to seem.
In Australia we have pre-poll voting (early voting), mail-in ballots, and every election day is a Saturday - with democracy sausages.
