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!
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.
In France, voting day is always a Sunday. And if you work on a Sunday (most people don’t), your boss has to schedule your working day so that you can go and vote.
Yeah, because in France they’re a hair trigger away from setting shit on fire, like all the time.
If that’s what it takes, I guess
Make voting take a week and limit campaigning to 90 days before the end of that week.
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.
“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.”
___My first thought as well. “We don’t need to make it easier to vote on election day, because not many people vote on election day” - let’s stop and think really hard about that for a minute.
These are the same people that think that more testing will make the number of COVID cases go up.
Shithole country. Honestly, together with the issues like voter roll purging and winner takes it all. How can you take this “pro/con” discussion even seriously?
The real question should be why the US is so undemocratic, what the forces are that drive this minority rule and prevent a more free and open society.
this is the pinnacle of stupid writing. Calling this “Research” is nonsense. You should have the day off if you have an “I voted” sticker. Not only should election day be a day off but so should:
- Primaries
- Special Elections
- Voter Registration deadlines.
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.
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.
My impression is that when most people mention “ranked choice” voting, what they really mean is “ranked choice voting with instant runoff” which is functionally identical to STAR voting.
The two are not functionally identical at all.
Ranked Choice is a broken Ordinal voting system.
All Ordinal voting systems are flawed, because when you have to rank A over B, you will eventually reach a point where C can become a spoiler candidate.
Cardinal voting systems are immune from this, because you rate the candidates independent of each other. It doesn’t matter how many candidates are on the ballot, because you’re rating them vs your support, not their rank vs each other.
Cardinal systems allow you to rate two candidates the same, either with full support or full disdain.
Do you have a link that explains what you’re talking about? I’m having a hard time reconciling my understanding of Ranked Choice (with instant runoff) with the downfalls you describe.
Edit: I came across this: https://betterchoices.vote/Cardinal It explains the spoiler problem with Ordinal voting systems, but also illustrates problems with Cardinal voting systems. Interesting stuff.
Ahh, the bullshit “bullet voting” nonsense.
That’s a sort of made up problem with cardinal systems that ignores one tiny little issue. Approval, is a Cardinal voting method that is 100% bullet voting, because there’s no scale. Just a simple yes and no per candidate.
It gives better results than every single Ordinal system.
These geeks study election systems in far too much detail. And have a handy little chart of Baysian Regret Basically they did math and computer shit to figure out how “happy” people would be with the results of a set number of simulated elections with roughly identical factors except the voting system used and how honestly vs strategic you are in your voting,
Approval, which is 100% bullet voting, and still comes out better for overall satisfaction of results than its closest Ordinal competitor.
Consensus is just Condorcet voting. Technically, Approval is Condorcet compliant. It might actually be the only true way to find the Condorcet winner.
Anyway, there’s more, and I should link more.
I’m so glad I found this site! I think I’ve been converted to a Consensus Voting proponent instead of Instant Runoff.
You can read more about it here: https://betterchoices.vote/ConsensusVoting
Specifically, which problem do you think that ranked choice proponents are incorrect about?
Ranked choice voting does one thing, allows people to vote for the candidates they actually want and that’s it. All kinds of people try to shoehorn in other ideas, but at the end of the day the one and only problem its intensed to solve is people having to vote for candidates they don’t like.
In Germany we always have elections on Sundays so it’s basically a public holiday (unlike in the US where stores are still open). There are enough places to vote (though you’re assigned to the one in your district for statistical reasons) so you rarely have to stand in line. I’ve seen pictures of voting lines in the US and was shocked…
Mail-in votes are available to everyone and it’s being used a lot but for many people going to the voting place in person has more meaning to it. Some even put on a suit, but that could also be because they are on the way to church.
Electronic voting was discussed but the consensus is that it’s not safe enough.
The question if it should be a public holiday in the US is weird to me as it is a very clear YES and also YES people should definitely always get a day off on public holidays wtf
I’ve seen pictures of voting lines in the US and was shocked…
Yeah, but those aren’t ubiquitous.
If you live in a suburb or rural area you can count on a dozen nearby polling stations and a 5 minute in and out.
If you live anywhere that supported the confederacy and might vote blue then you might have to deal with a 4-5 hour wait, coupled with provisional ballots that are not counted, voting roll purges, and other minor issues.
I guess what I’m saying is those crazy lines aren’t too much of an issue so long as you try to vote in a part of the country Hitler himself didn’t write of as an example of genetic enforcement to follow in Mein Kampf.
Thanks for the clarification!
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.
I don’t really think we need to police the extra day off. If someone was unable to vote that day for some reason, they shouldn’t be penalized.
While I agree we should police it, have you ever worked for a big corporation, they are going to police it…
The law can be written to prevent that easily. One flex day off for every employee during the election season is mandatory to give people the opportunity to vote.
That is how every other major holiday is handled. Just because I get a winter holiday break every year doesn’t mean that my employer checks to see if I was Santa eligible before I get the vacation.
The goal isn’t to get people an extra day off, it’s to get them to vote.
When I go to a conference or take paid time for education I’m required to prove what I was doing.
We should also fight to get people more general vacation time, sure. But as far as mandating days off for voting I think it makes sense to make sure that they use that day to vote.
Otherwise we’ll just end up with a lot of cheap weekend cruises popping up to take advantage of all the extra holiday time around elections with no increase in voter turnout.
God forbid Americans get more holiday time, especially considering that the rest of the developed world tends to get a lot more than we do.
The purpose of a day off for election day is to get people to vote. Tying it to a requirement to actually vote (not even necessarily on the same day) gives an incentive to vote instead of just another day off.
They should be getting an extra month of vacation time in general, absolutely, but that has nothing to do with incentivizing voting.
I got extra time off work for having a Covid vaccination. Since I was getting vaccinated anyway, it was just more time off just like a voting day would be. But for some people, the extra time off was enough incentive to get them to go to Walgreens and get a shot. If they’d just given everybody extra time off for Covid vaccinations without us having to prove that we did it, then those who weren’t planning to get the shot still wouldn’t have. And the point was to get people vaccinated for public health.
The problem with that is that it incentivizes people who are uninformed about politics to vote randomly for a day off. Our issue is not that everyone needs to vote, but that everyone who chooses to is able to and not hindered by a company.
If they want to incentivize people to get informed and get involved, then they should abolish the electoral college so people will feel like their votes count in states where they are a minority. Reinstating voting rights for felons would also get people motivated, because people who have been burned by the system may want to work to change it.
Even with all that, there will be people who do not care, do not learn, and will not want to vote, and they should be given that option. They have deemed themselves unqualified, and that should be believed.
It’s perfectly legal to turn in a blank ballot. When there’s an uncontested candidate running for office in my area that I do not support our I don’t know the difference between the candidates I simply don’t select a candidate for that position while voting for the candidates and issues I do understand.
Yes, but if someone intends not to vote at all, why waste their time and make lines longer by having them turn in a totally blank ballot?
God, Americans are so cucked when it comes to employee rights (I’m an American). Oh no, someone might get an extra day off!? Disgusting!
I get your point, and yes people should use the day to vote. But trying to mandate it, or police it in some way to make sure you didn’t accidentally give your employee a day off for “no reason,” is fucking absurd.
I imagine in most cases, it would probably even cost more to monitor, than the amount they lost for not having that employee for one day.
This isn’t about making sure businesses make more money. It’s about incentivizing people to vote.
My business gave extra time off to people who got Covid vaccines because it incentivizes people to do something that’s good for them and for society. For people who were already getting the vaccines it was a bonus day, and it gave the push for people on the fence.
It should be the same with voting. The reality is most people do have the opportunity to vote, but choose not to take the time to do it. An extra holiday won’t change that.
Giving them an extra day off no-strings attached is a good thing. They should get an extra month. But if we are specifically trying to get people to vote, then that particular day off should come with strings just like my vaccine day.
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 think I’ve gotten one of those stickers once in my decades of voting. I never outright ask, and most times they’re out on the table or whatever… But no, they don’t give them out like they’re receipts.
However, giving each person a receipt would probably be pretty trivial…
weird, I’ve gotten one of those stickers every time i’ve voted my entire life. i thought it was just a given.
I’ve only ever gotten a sticker twice…plus you can buy rolls of them online.
Who cares about evidence of voting, you work enough days of the year, just take it for heavens sake. If I add up all days there are federal holidays in my country I get nearly 2 months worth and that is without paid or unpaid leave days you get from the employer
None of which was the point of the question, but thanks for the added perspective.
It’s not about getting the day off: the goal is getting people to vote. Tying an extra day off to actually voting is more likely to get people to the polls
Yes, you give them the day off for election day. They know why they are off. If they’re going to vote, they’re going to vote. Simply giving everyone the day off is “getting people to vote.”
Some sort of monitoring to make sure people are actually voting on the day is an absurd and pointless idea. If we’re going that far, then just do what Australia does and make it compulsory.
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.
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.
It’s almost as if people should be paid enough and have enough PTO to live and enjoy it, as well as vote.
The Republican Party benefits from low voter turnout, so they’d block this at every opportunity.
they’ve publicly admited they cant win fair elections.
Yes. There are no drawbacks.
