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Democratic Exercise

Election Day should be a federal holiday

CORRECTION: This editorial incorrectly stated that 46 percent of citizens did not vote in the 2004 presidential election.  In fact, 36 percent of citizens did not vote.  The Crimson regrets the error.


For many citizens, voting day is a day like any other—filled with the unavoidable responsibilities of work, kids, and day-to-day household chores. While the need to accomplish such quotidian tasks should not overshadow the importance of voting, the cumbersome obligations of a workday too often deter voters and diminish the vibrancy of our democracy.

In 2004, only 64 percent of citizens voted in the presidential election—and this was considered a “good” turnout, up four percent from turnout in 2000. In the 2000 presidential election, a staggering 20 percent of eligible non-voters avoided the polls due to “scheduling conflict or inconvenient voting procedures.” And, of those affected by such calendar clashes, most cited inflexible workday schedules—too often correlated with lower socioeconomic status—as barriers to voting. At its best, then, the system is merely broken; at its worst, it discriminates along socioeconomic lines.

Luckily, there is an easy way to improve upon the status quo: Congress should vote to make Election Day—that is, the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November—a federal holiday. This is no new idea: Election Day is already a holiday in states such as Delaware, Hawaii, Kentucky, Maryland, Montana, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, and West Virginia. The idea has even been contemplated on the federal level, too. In 2005, Michigan Representative John Conyers proposed the establishment of “Democracy Day,” a holiday that would fuse Election Day and Veterans Day in order to both promote voting and remind citizens that voting is a form of national service. Making Election Day a federal holiday—whether in addition to or in conjunction with Veterans Day—would instantaneously turn every workplace into a potential polling place and would result in a drastic increase in the number of possible poll workers, who currently run in short supply.

In addition, all states should take more dramatic measures to loosen restrictions on voting by absentee ballot. A few states already allow any citizen, regardless of his or her residence, to vote by mail, and these measures have been met by marked upswings in participation.

Voting is crucial to a robust democracy—not just on the presidential level, but on the congressional, state, and local level as well. On the local level especially, off-cycle election days exacerbate already low participation rates. As such, all possible efforts should be made to move elections for local officials—such as members of city councils and school boards—to the federally-recognized election day. It is in the best interest of both the country and the citizen to obviate as many impediments to democratic participation as possible.

That said, it behooves us as citizens to remember that not all 46 percent of those who didn’t vote in 2004 failed to do so because of a scheduling conflict; some were merely apathetic, others illiterate, and still others indecisive. Political participation is the bedrock of American democracy, and those citizens abstaining out of mere lack of interest should remember that their vote, however insignificant it may seem, does actually matter.

Perhaps if the federal government deemed Election Day important enough to make a holiday, voting would seem more important than yet another banal errand.


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