John Quiggin and Kevin Drum ponder the possibly apocryphal origins of America's idiosyncratic habit of voting on Tuesdays. Whatever the reason for that choice of day, it's clear that the reason wasn't "this day will maximize voter participation in 21st century post-industrial America." We should change it and vote on Saturdays. The vote-by-mail option also has promise.
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The Mystery of Tuesday Voting
28 Sep 2007 01:07 pm
Comments (32)
I've lived in Oregon for 5 years now and vote by mail is awesome.
In reality I never actually vote by mail, I fill out the ticket at home the last day and drop it off to the nice volunteers outside the library, but still it is much easier and quicker than any other way.
I don't by into the various theoretical horror stories -- we've had no serious problems. Much, much fewer than we hear from other states.
Brilliant idea!
lets make voting on Saturdays so Jews can't vote.
Well, voting on Tuesdays improperly disenfranchises Third-Day Adventists, if you want to look at it that way.
Fellow member of the tribe Matthew Yglesias ... don't you realize that some of us would not vote on Saturday? (says the guy who is grumbling away at work on Sukkoth, when it is commanded that we should be joyful and not engage in servile labor) ...
You could say "well, you can always get an absentee ballot", but some localities make you go through hoops to do so. For example, they make you justify why you are applying for an absentee ballot -- what if the local election authorities decide that Sabbath observance is not a good enough reason to vote absentee?
Why not have election day as a holiday like they do in other democracies? Or have more than one election day? I know people will object to the latter -- "early reporting will influence later voters" ... but this already happens: e.g., by the time most people vote (after work) in Cali, the election's already been "decided". Of course, other countries have media black-outs on election reporting until everyone's already voted ...
I think it's pretty obvious that the number of Jews that observe the Sabbath to the extent that would prevent them from voting is greatly outweighed by, say, the number of people who can't vote on Tuesdays because of their jobs.
Also...a vote-by-mail option (or just the regular absentee process) could help this.
Also...Tuesdays are fine, but should be a holiday.
Also...I was in Wisconsin for the 2004 vote, and same-day registration is pretty awesome.
That is all.
Vote on Saturday and make sure the voting hours extend well past sundown.
Vote on Saturday AND Sunday. Why does it have to be a single day election day?
Keep it Tuesday (or Wednesday) but make it a holiday. Religion aside, people travel on weekends. One day off in midweek: people will stay home near their polling place. Turnout would be higher. Higher turnout lends greater legitimacy to the outcome.
I think this is all just silly. I lived in Kent, WA near Seattle and always voted by mail. I live in Texas now and vote in person by absentee. I've only voted on Tuesday in person once in the past 10 years. There's no reason to unless you just forget to do it earlier.
Voting by mail "has promise"? In California, just about half of all voters use absentee ballots. I'd say voting by mail has arrived. I'm pretty sure you can do it anywhere.
Leave it on Tuesday, make it a holiday, and vote by mail. Why is that so hard?
In California, just about half of all voters use absentee ballots. I'd say voting by mail has arrived. I'm pretty sure you can do it anywhere. - too many steves
California makes it much easier to vote absentee than other places do (having lived both in Cali and outside, I can tell you, in general, that few states have as good of a system of voter information as Cali does). You can't just get an absentee ballot in many states, no questions asked ... you have to justify why you are getting one. And you have to reapply each election cycle unless you are disabled. In many places it would be far too easy to deny, for personal reasons, absentee ballots.
People tend to be out of town on Saturdays more than on Tuesdays. They will not cancel their travel plans so they can VOTE.
I say, make Tuesday afternoon a national holiday. Not the whole day (people will leave town), just the afternoon.
i agree with tuesday holiday voting. but i'm more disturbed by MY's repeated flouting of jewish traditions. first the shooting on yom kippur, now this. you need to say some ashamnus and strike your chest.
Voting on a Saturday in November will also "disenfranchise" a lot of college football fans (myself included). Which on balance would probably be good for Democrats...
Why not just have an election week? Or maybe an election three day weekend? There's no reason why the thing has to be done in a day.
you need to say some ashamnus and strike your chest. - David
Fortunately for MY, even though we say the Book is Sealed right after Neilah on Yom Kippur, we all know that the Book isn't really sealed until Hoshana Rabba (the Day of the Great Hossannah). If I were MY, I'd be reciting Psalms all through this holiday, read the Book of Deuteronomy at once and beat those willow branches awful hard when the time comes ;)
Actually, given that I'm at work today, I should take my own advice!
Happy Sukkoth Everyone! :)
People tend to be out of town on Saturdays more than on Tuesdays. They will not cancel their travel plans so they can VOTE.
A nice display of upper middle-class solipsism.
"The vote-by-mail option also has promise." -- if you count voter fraud as promising, I guess it is...
I do not have the book right in front of me to site but check out "Why the Electoral College is Bad for America" The author says that voting on tuesdays was a result of long travel times to town centers where voting occured early in America's history. Because one could not travel on Sunday, the Christian day of rest, and traveling from the farm to the city center could take a full day, a day of travel between sunday and the day of voting was neccessary. I think this is why saturday was not chosen as it would require back travel on sunday. Also it is the first tuesday after the first monday in November to assure that voting would not happen on November 1st, All Saints Day, which used to be a major religious holiday.
We should just make it a national holiday and day off from work (like Labor Day) and make sure it stays in the middle of the week so that people won't be tempted to go on vacation or anything during it.
Then we could all go out and vote and watch the results come in on a cable news station of our choice. America!
And an extra day off wouldn't kill anybody.
"We should just make it a national holiday and day off from work (like Labor Day)"
Just because it is a federal holiday doesn't mean that my company will recognize it and let me off work. This would just mean that public employees would have the day off.
I mentioned this in comments over at Drum's but Bill Bradly proposed in his book the idea of weekend voting (i.e. both Saturday and Sunday). This would get around the problem of voting on the Jewish or Christian Sabbath. And for non-Christians it would be extra flexibility.
Seems good to me.
I like the Saturday and Sunday election for the flexibility. The most ideal way for me (living in CA) would be if the polls open and close at the same time across the country, and results can't be reported until those polls close. I hate the election being pretty much decided before I get home from work.
Great to see a dialogue about this important issue, and election reform more generally! Be sure to check out the Why Tuesday? Candidate Challenge... we're giving the presidential candidates until October 30th to respond... in a video... with their plans for fixing our broken voting system. The United States is 139th in the world in voter turnout. WTF?!
"Voting on a Saturday in November will also "disenfranchise" a lot of college football fans (myself included). Which on balance would probably be good for Democrats..."
Why I oughtta!
First Limbaugher claims the military for hisself, now you're claimin' I got vote against my interests because I like college sports! Next you'll be tellin' me that If I want access to some sunlight I gotta lick Ann Coulter's left tit...
I forgot to add, SHEESH...
Chris,
The fraud canard has been played out, we've used Vote By Mail in Oregon for years and it works great.
Re: traveling from the farm to the city center could take a full day
Maybe in frontier areas, but in settled places towns were seldom more than an hour or two apart, riding if not walking distance. How else did farm children go to school, or farm families go to church? And how did they take their produce to market?
Buy the way does no one else have early voting? Here in Florida for major elections you can vote up to two weeks before election day. It's proven to be fairly popular.
Is there any evidence that weekend voting would increase turnout? None of the sites linked here say anything about it, and the my five minutes of googling found only one reference which claimed a negative effect. I couldn't find the actual article though.
Why do we have to vote on a single day, anyway?
With vote by mail, early voting, etc., you can spread voting out.
The major objection to this seems to be that early results will influence later voters, but I think that already occurs on election day itself, and you might be able to deal with that by sealing vote counts until the end of the election period. (In practice, exit polls and the like would be hard to shut down, but they certainly didn't seem to influence the result in 2004.)
Comments closed October 12, 2007.
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Heads in the Sand
Voting by mail improperly dilutes the lengths of terms that elected officials serve before elections by allowing a large number of people to vote at different times. And what about fraud? And what about the piety and community aspect? Still the way we do it now is pretty strange.
Posted by Moral Panicker | September 28, 2007 1:12 PM