America's voter turnout trails most other peer democracies.
At 55 percent, even in a presidential election year, that turnout rate
ranked 26 out of 35 other nations, below Mexico and Greece.
One of the reasons could be that voting in America is on a Tuesday, a
weekday, and that can be a hassle.
According to surveys conducted by the U.S.
Census Bureau, many people don't vote because they are either too busy or
have conflicting work or school schedules.
By comparison, many other countries with higher turnout rates vote on
weekends or holidays.
Why, then, doesn't the U.S.
just vote on weekends or holidays too?
The answer goes back to 1792, when America's Congress set out to personify
the country's new constitution into a set of laws.
When it came to setting up elections that Congress designated a multi-week
period roughly spanning the month of November.
They chose November because farmers would be busy with planting and
harvest in the Spring, Summer and early Fall.
While cold weather would prevent people from turning out in the Winter.
Beyond that, though, Congress left it up to the states, allowing them to
take their own needs into account when setting up specific dates.
This setup made sense when you think about the geography of the United
States at that time.
This was a massive and rugged country connected via a network of patchy,
unpaved roads. It took information a long time to travel from one place to
another and might vary greatly state by state.
But as economic and technological progress began to bring the country
closer together during the first half of the eighteen hundreds, fears
began to emerge that results in states with earlier elections could start
impacting how people voted in states with later elections.
In 1845, Congress moved to designate one day for presidential elections
and believe it or not, they were looking for a day everyone could take
off. Sunday wouldn't work because it would interfere with religious
activities. Monday would have worked because many farmers would need a day
to travel to polling places.
But Tuesday made sense.
Citizens could travel on Monday, vote Tuesday, then be back home in time
for market day on Wednesday.
So Tuesday it was.
As the country evolved over the past 175 years, though that day picked for
its agrarian convenience, created problems of its own.
Tuesday is really inconvenient day for a lot of people because a lot of
people work on the weekdays.
Imagine a person wakes up, drops off their kids at school, goes to work,
picks up their kids that day care can be a really full day.
And finding time to get to a polling station in the middle of all that can
be really tricky for a lot of people.
Even though many employers are required by state laws to give time off for
voting, laws vary state by state and employees can still feel informal
pressure to skip voting.
I think that there are a lot of people who don't vote because it's
difficult because something comes up and it's hard for them to find time.
In a Washington Post op ed arguing for holiday voting, Harvard Professor
Michael McFaul and Stanford Professor Adam Bonica outlined this disparity.
Drawing from census data, they argue the highest turnout comes from
salaried professionals with flexible work schedules such as lawyers,
educators and executives.
While the lowest turnout comes from hourly paid workers in service jobs in
restaurants and retail.
For those working people who do vote, the cost can be very real.
M.I.T political scientist Charles Stewart estimates waiting in line
collectively cost 2012 voters about $500 million in lost wages.
Tuesday voting may also increase wait time for many voters at the polls.
For most people, the most convenient times to vote on Tuesday tend to be
either in the morning before work or in the evening after work.
And some polling stations tend to have pretty long lines when they first
open and right before they close.
Whereas in the middle of the day they tend to be a lot more empty.
Those lines also disproportionately impact lower income and minority
communities. According to research by Steven Pettigrew at University of
Pittsburgh, voting lines are about twice as long and predominantly
minority communities and minority voters are six times as likely to wait
longer than an hour to vote.
Moving elections to weekends or holidays could help alleviate some of
these issues.
So if everybody had the day off, it would be a lot easier for people to
find the time to vote. It would also change the pattern of voting.
People's schedules are going to be spread out a lot more evenly throughout
the day, so that could be shorter times to go about when people actually
do go to the polling sites.
It would increase the availability of poll workers, and especially if we
have it as a national holiday, it would create sort of a civic spirit.
It would give us the opportunity to really spread that civic duty in all
of those social norms which have been shown to really increase turnout.
But experts remain lukewarm on whether pursuing reform is actually a good
idea, noting some of the very people the idea was meant to help might not
even have weekends or holidays off.
There's a lot of people that have to work on these national holidays and
they tend to be lower income, underrepresented, disadvantaged groups,
people who are working minimum wage, people who are working hourly jobs.
A U.S. government report commissioned by Congress that looked into the
possibility of holding elections on weekends also outlined a variety of
potential logistical issues.
Most election officials interviewed actually said it would be harder to
find poll workers and polling locations on weekends.
It turns out many pool volunteers are county employees being paid for a
full day's work for high school students being offered exemptions from
class. Many polling locations are also churches with weekend worship
services or schools with weekend events.
Surveyed officials worried those locations might be harder to reserve and
access. Finally, the cost of paying staff overtime for weekend work and
potentially holding the elections over two days to not interfere with any
one denominations. Religious services could present major cost increases.
Officials who had already held local and primary elections on weekends
also noted that poll workers were simply less likely to show up on
Saturday or Sunday.
In addition to that report, experts on voting lines have voiced their own
concerns. I do think that there's merit in some of those reforms moving to
a weekend or a big national holiday, but probably not going to impact the
lines. Lines these experts say aren't as prevalent as people tend to
think. There's a perception out there that they are a widespread problem.
And I do think the media is very good at finding a line and putting those
lines on television and and focusing on the problems.
I don't think the perception of the reality.
My organization, the Bipartisan Policy Center, decided to figure out a way
to actually get the precinct level data.
What we saw was, lines are not necessarily a widespread problem, but where
they are problems that can be very severe.
And we also know that the impact of long lines is not spread evenly across
races or income.
Still, even in places with severe line problems, it's unclear if the cause
is voting on a workday with the Bipartisan Policy Centers Research citing
everything from funding to precinct size and location, poll workers,
voting machine, technical issues, timing of voter arrival and even ballot
length as causes for long lines.
And as the U.S. continues to grapple with questions of how systemic racial
discrimination might relate to closure of polling stations in and
diversion of election resources away from minority communities, simply
changing when voting occurs leaves those larger structural issues in
place. There's also academic pushback on the notion that
weekend and holiday voting in many other countries with higher turnout
rates offers proof that Tuesday voting in the U.S.
suppresses turnout.
There's so many other differences between the United States and those
countries, so it's hard to determine which particular factors are
affecting the lower levels of turnout in the U.S.
The voter turnout does appear lower than other countries.
I take some issue with whether or not we are all calculating turnout in
the same way. We have many more elections than other countries in the
world. We're holding primary elections.
We're holding general elections.
We've got midterm elections.
We've got local elections.
So part of the difference that we're seeing here is people, the United
States have so many opportunities to participate that they just decide to
pick and choose which elections they're going to participate in.
There's also questions over whether widespread low turnout is still a
major problem in the US.
Over the past two cycles, especially within relatively high turnout, I
mean, turnout during the 2018 election nationally was the highest in
almost a century for a mid-term election.
So I do think that we are doing better.
There used to be a big issue.
What's happened over the last 15 years or so is that American turnout for
presidential elections and last time for midterms has gone up a lot.
And most other countries that don't have compulsory voting has gone down.
That's not to say there isn't still usually a gap.
But it's not a huge turnout problem anymore.
And that's largely because people are more interested and excited by and
about politics. In other words, low turnout may be more about civic
engagement than the day of the week.
Even so, no matter how much you do to make voting easier, many experts say
a certain percentage of the population simply won't vote.
The biggest reason people don't vote because they're not interested.
Australia has compulsory voting.
10 percent of the people break the law by not voting and 5 percent spoil
their ballots. In a place where elections are held on a Saturday, where
you can vote by mail beforehand, where you can go to a pre polling place
and vote in person beforehand.
There's just people who don't want to do this, and it's very hard for
people who do want to do it to understand that.
But it's real. But in America, where you have to register in order to
vote, turnout is in the 86 percent range for registered voters, meaning
making it easier to register or just automatically registering everyone
might boost turnout more than weekend or holiday voting.
There are a number of states that required you to register 30 days before
an election, and that can be problematic because for a lot of people that
might not think about the election until the weeks before actual election
day when the campaign gets really intense and it's really in the news.
And so a lot of people get shut out before the election because they miss
that deadline. And the reality is many across the country can
actually already vote on weekends.
Where we have weekend voting and holiday voting in and a lot of states
already effectively through early voting.
Early voting designates a window before Election Day where citizens can
vote in-person at various polling sites.
Well, mail voting allows someone to have the state send them a ballot.
That person can then fill the ballot out at their convenience and return
it to the state when they're ready for it to be counted.
It's only really a handful of states left that don't have some sort of no
excuse early voting either by mail or by person.
And so I don't really think necessarily we need to move to have an
election day on a holiday or on the weekend.
We just need to clean up these last few states that don't allow this
convenience voting. Thirty nine states offer early voting.
Thirty three states offer some form of mail voting.
Experts have said that mail and voting especially can offer some unique
advantages. It's really nice for a lot of people because they get the
ballot and they can fill it out at home on their own time.
It likely leads to more informed voting because people can see what their
ballot and take the time to figure out the different races.
One of the cheapest ways to run elections is through all mail ballot
elections. You don't have to have a costly polling location.
You don't need to have lots of voting equipment.
And so if you want to do the cheapest way of running elections, you do all
mail BALLOT elections. By the way, those all mail ballot elections?
They tend to have some of the highest turnout rates in the country as
well, not just in federal and state elections, but also in local
elections. Weekend voting has also faced political hurdles in Washington.
One thing that's difficult about electoral reform is you need to convince
the people in power to change the system that put them in power.
When Congress has actually taken up the question of weekend or holiday
voting. The issue has come down on party lines.
It's a partisan issue. There is this perception that anything that's going
to increase turnout is likely going to benefit the Democratic Party,
because when we do surveys of people, non-voters tend to say that they
would support Democrat candidates.
For example, only Democrat congressmen supported the Twenty Seventeen
Weekend Voting Act and more recently, the for the People Act, which among
other things would have made Election Day a federal holiday.
In short weekend or holiday, voting might not quite be the quick fix
originally suggested.
Right now, there's not enough political will to make this reform on a
national level. Its ability to jeopardize the re-election of those already
in power and the partisan nature of the wider turnout debate create
serious political hurdles to passing it in Congress.
Experts also seem unconvinced by the evidence to claim that weekend or
holiday voting would significantly increase turnout.
Instead, many point to other reforms like early voting or mail in ballots,
which already offer de facto non workday voting.
But at the state level, these other reforms are gaining steam with pockets
of both Democrats and Republicans, resulting in a growing body of election
law that encourages more participation in our democracy.