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[Reelya]

How many of you support making Election Day a national holiday?

You know, here it's always scheduled for a Saturday, which solves 99% of that problem. Sure some people have to work on Saturdays and won't be able to hit a polling place, but they can still postal vote, and there probably won't be as many postal votes to process if the polling day isn't a normal workday.

[mainiac]

But saturday is the most important workday for some people.

[Reelya]

They can postal vote. There are a lot less of them than people who absolutely have to work weekdays. "Some" people will be inconvenienced by Saturday voting, as opposed to "almost everyone else" as it currently stands.

And the ridiculous lines on weekday polls are probably vastly inefficient, as most people are queuing before or after work. Whereas the polling places are probably massively empty in between. Saturday voting would likely render that a moot issue as people would trickle in all day, reducing costs and number of polling places / workers needed.

[mainiac]

Yes in an ideal world they would postal vote.  But we know that not as many people do postal vote as vote in person.  And that is despite the democrats making a fairly big push to encourage postal voting.

[Reelya]

Yeah but that's an even better argument for only doing it when less people are working.

Right now, almost everyone is denied a vote surreptitiously. Reducing that to "some" people who work Saturdays is an improvement. And I'll bet you almost all of those Saturday workers are also weekday workers. So the number of people re-enfranchised by weekend voting is large, the number of people disenfranchised is very small - only Saturday workers who don't also work weekdays.

[mainiac]

Yeah, like a monday on a three day weekend.

[Frumple]

Y'know, has anyone in the US actually argued against making election day a holiday? Like, I've never seen someone saying it was a bad idea. Anyone. Ever. Mention it to folks of pretty much any political inclination and they're like, "... yeah, that'd be a good idea."

Do we even having polling data on the subject? Some inclination of how many folks in the US support making it a holiday?

[Reelya]

Just pointing out that's an unnecessary economic hit. Nice for well-off pricks to have a day off, not necessarily so great for the working poor. At least going by the way things work in the USA in terms of wages.

Sure, you can say adding a national day off won't affect GDP too much, but I doubt the economic pain is going to be evenly shared.

Also, if it's in the middle of the week (e.g. Nov. 6 is declared a holiday no matter what), then that's just a pain, and if it's a long weekend, then people can't fully utilize it, since they can't travel for the full three days, since they have to get back to their polling place. In other words, I think it's a poor use of a public holiday. Just stick the vote on a saturday, and if there's a good argument for adding another holiday somewhere, then add it and leave it as a pure holiday.

[mainiac]

Just pointing out that's an unnecessary economic hit. Nice for well-off pricks to have a day off, not necessarily so great for the working poor.

Okay, so we axe Columbus Day in favor of Democracy Day.  Win-Win.

Really it's two different arguments.  One is "should election day be one of the federal holidays?"  The other is "should we have one more federal holiday then right now?"

[Frumple]

I'd be perfectly fine just adjusting the election cycle and having the vote be on an existent holiday, too, personally. Rather we be given some kind of general reward for voting beyond the normal civic aspect (day off'd be nice!), but I'll take just making the civic aspect a little bit easier.

[mainiac]

Columbus day is in early October compared to election day in early November so it wouldn't even be too big of a shift.

[Sergarr]

I'd be perfectly fine just adjusting the election cycle and having the vote be on an existent holiday, too, personally.

It's rather surprising why this isn't already the case. You'd think it would be rather easy to move election date slightly to allow the working class to vote without getting fucked by executives.

[mainiac]

It's because Ted Cruz is blackmailing John Kerry about an incident with a dead hooker in the bedroom of a Saudi Prince.  Because of this blackmail, John Kerry made Harry Reid vote against his own law which would have moved elections to Columbus day.  You can see all of this on the next season of House of Cards, they'll just change the names.

[Max™]

Why is Columbus still celebrated?

[Frumple]

Inertia and stubbornness.