On Oct 17, 2008, at 6:17 PM, Raph Frank wrote:
9) Elections on Tuesday
why not make election day a holiday? or hold it on weekends?
I thought they were held over multiple days with 'early voting', or
was that changed?
There was a useful piece on this subject this morning on NPR <http://www.npr.org./templates/story/story.php?storyId=95862852
> (the audio isn't available as I write, but should be up shortly).
Well over half the United States (31 or 34, ISTR) have early voting,
leaving a significant minority that do not.
California, or at least some CA counties, push early voting fairly
hard, and a growing percentage of voters in the state vote before
election day--more than a third, recently, IIRC. You can vote by mail,
or by stopping by the registrar's office, which is set up with several
voting booths; that's what I did last week.
California goes a bit too far, in my view, in that voting starts about
30 days before Election Day, which tends to draw out an already too-
long campaign season. I ran for my local school board a few years
back, and it's hard to run for local office knowing that more than a
third of your voters will be voting before the height of the campaign
(in this case a series of debates sponsored by various community
groups during October). Why thirty days? I don't really know; I assume
it was in the "more is better" category of decision making.
Oregon, which is 100% vote-by-mail, says 14-18 days, which seems like
more than enough.
All that considered, I rather miss the sense of community of a local
polling place. Mine have been in somebody's garage, or a local fire
station, until my precinct became vote-by-mail, under a California
election code provision that allows registrars to designate very small
precincts as such.
Why Tuesday, by the way? The usual explanation sounds plausible enough:
In 1845, before Florida, California, and Texas were states or
slavery had been abolished, Congress needed to pick a time for
Americans to vote. We were an agrarian society. We traveled by horse
and buggy. Farmers needed a day to get to the county seat, a day to
vote, and a day to get back, without interfering with the three days
of worship. So that left Tuesday and Wednesday, but Wednesday was
market day. So, Tuesday it was. In 1875 Congress extended the
Tuesday date for national House elections and in 1914 for federal
Senate elections.
http://www.whytuesday.org/answer (yes, there's an organization and
website dedicated to the issue; no doubt it's not the only one)
Tuesday voting obviously isn't universal; is it strictly a US
peculiarity?
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