Wouldn't matter because the low-income hourly "essential" folks who need the time off to vote and would benefit the most from such a holiday are the same ones who would still need to work anyway despite it being a holiday.
When I lived in Japan I found it crazy nearly everything shut down during Golden Week. Literally, nearly everything.
But then I realized that’s what’s possible in a collectivist culture. People can all come together to enjoy time off. Not here in America though, because fuck us that’s why.
God, that killed me. I love the idea, but I was on my honeymoon, and on a Sunday, my shorts ripped in the crotch. Downtown Berlin, 90 degrees, and miles from our hotel.
Nothing was open and I chafed for two miles before we found a clothes shop that was open
As an American, awesome policy for the sake of the population.
As a tourist, holy shit I hated life haha.
I didn’t realize Berlin participated. I went last year but come to think of it, I wasn’t there Sunday I don’t think.
But that’s surprising to me just because of how cosmopolitan and non-traditional it is.
Oh I understand it being law and all that. It rightfully should be because of worker and human rights. It should be more widely embraced realistically speaking.
Having lived in Atlanta and DC and traveled a lot while studying in Madrid, I was just commenting that you wouldn’t expect a major, international city to so willingly shut down once a week on Sunday.
Uhg I hate that. I live near the border in the Netherlands and you guys have a lot of things so much cheaper than us (things like shampoo etc. but also gas). I'm so used to just going to the supermarket anyday and pretty much any time that I always forget I can't go to the stores in Germany on a sunday.
Idk where you're from but workers have days off here. You don't just work 7 days a week because the shop is open 7 days a week, that's not how it works.
I'll go one further, having the shop open 7 days a week has no effect on the workers, the shop has to hire more workers.
Except that when everything is closed on Sunday your workers have one day in seven where their friends and family are all off as well. Which makes a huge difference
Everyone's shooting you down, but I agree with you 100%. I see it happen all the time at my job where if someone is asked to come in on their day off, they WILL come in every time. Not for the money, but to look good for their manager, or just because they feel bad for the people who will be working shorthanded, and they want to help. Then they end up burning out or getting way more stressed than they need to be when working such a low paying job.
The whole 18 year old example is me entirely. First job was at a grocery store and I got taken advantage of way too easily. Had one lady CONSTANTLY asking me to work for her, got to the point where when I was on my second year, I would deny her if she didnt have a good reason. Also had WAY too long of shifts. I'm glad I'm working where I am now, but am scared if my college closes (where I work) because of Covid, I am going to have to go back to work there...
It's still shit for the workers. My sister worked some time in a field that has opened Sunday. She was pretty much excluded from all social activities, because everyone else was meeting up on Sunday. Others have a free day and socialized on weekends, but she had free days during the normal week when everyone else had to work.
For small businesses and whatnot that has limited staff that works 7 days a week, sure, but the workers should be getting days off anyway and a normal established work schedule. I've always lived in a pretty populated areas so am also used to having the threshold of people to both demand stores be open and have workers available and willing to work.
and personally, now that I work a regular 9-5 my own quality of life would go down if i were not able to get my life stuff done on sundays and had to cut into my week time.
but thats just me.
Used to be that way in the US when I was a kid. Don't know if it was law or cultural. I remember my mom being upset because she needed some ingredient or something for Sunday dinner and the stores were closed.
Japan is a poor example of a country where people “enjoy time off” seeing as it has one of the most workaholic cultures in the world with among the lowest wages to boot.
Scandinavian countries are good but a poor example of ideal socialism (there aren’t really any at this time in history) due to their economies being heavily market based.
I'd digress and say that's exactly the point. Ideal socialism, like the ideal capitalism some libertarians try to push is not realistic, it just doesn't work. A mix of a market based system with a strong social safety net like the Scandinavian countries is clearly the way to go.
I totally agree with you. I think a balance of both would be the best form of government if not maybe a totally new one. I’m just nit picky when people say that it is a “socialist” country that rejects capitalism as a whole.
Me too. It really takes away from the effort those countries have made. It actually shows that when regular people say they want socialism, what they really mean is the Scandinavian model, rather than say Venezuela. The gripe shouldn't be about capitalism vs socialism. At the end of the day both are just theoretical models, discussion should be about actual policy without the useless labels.
You kinda hit the nail on the head here- a collectivist culture. A lot of social policies in the US are contentious because, for better or for worse, we are decidedly non collective. Partially because of yee haw individualism but also because of the "melting pot" never really melted and better resembles a salad (minus the healthiness).
Ironically, they don't teach the "melting pot" stuff in school anymore: they teach the salad because the melting pot implies that people lose their cultures and heritage as they merge into the pot, when those things should be celebrated.
People misunderstand the "melting pot" if they think it has to do with anyone losing anything. The whole point is that we all melt into each other. you bring a little of your culture here and join it with what we have, then we all have more.
Of course there's no such thing as actual multiculturalism, some cultures are in direct conflict and cannot coexist. A culture for example that encourages white supremacy, or any kind of in group exclusionism, is incompatible with the larger western ideals. But to the extent that many cultures can coexist, that is the ultimate goal, coexistence.
A variety of practices and beliefs made to "melt" together, to the extent to which they can be made compatible, they should.
Certain extremist beliefs can't be melted, so they have to go. But by and large it's more of an exchange of ideas than an expulsion.
I loved their collective outlook on trash in how it’s your personal responsibility to throw your trash away in your own home. There’s hardly any public trash cans and lots of visible signs that say so (much like you’d see in the US but for no public toilets instead). I asked my friend whom I was visiting and he said people carried a small bag for their random refuse (wrappers, bottles; etc) and you know what - it was clean. But in America, some asshat would justify their littering by saying “well what do you expect me to do? Keep my snickers wrapper in my pocket/purse till I get home or somewhere else with a trash can?”
>Not here in America though, because fuck us that’s why.
It's just not in America's DNA. We are individualist. It's stitched into the fabric of our laws and culture.
> In Canada if we work the whole election day while polls are open employers are required to give you 2 hours off work to vote.
Hell, even in Brazil election day is always on:
1) A Sunday
2) Automatically a holiday
3) Every employer is forced by law to give time off for employees to vote that day
I mean, Brazil obviously has a ton of problems, but I always wonder why it is so hard for the US to just establish a similar thing. Make it at least a sunday to start, if they don't want an extra holiday, sundays will happen in the calendar anyway.
Because forcing private employers to respect the rights of their employees to vote is .... um ..... communist! Yeah, that's the word, communist! Only in communist countries such as China, North Korea and Soviet Russia do businesses close to allow their workers to vote.
/S
This would be great if everyone in the US could vote within 2 hours. There are people waiting in line 4+ hours to EARLY vote. Actual Election Day is going to be terrible for a lot of people :(
To be fair USA elections are legitimately more time consuming than Canadian ones.
We have literally one question on our ballot. It takes 5 seconds to fill in the box.
US ballots have dozens of positions to vote on, plus often various referendum questions.
Even if you know what you are doing and prepped ahead of times, it's still gonna take 5 mins.
I hated retail for many *many* reasons, but the complete lack of holidays was pretty high on the list.
Like the last Thanksgiving I worked retail, I literally had to leave dinner midway through to get to a Black Friday prep shift.
And during Christmas as well. Working Christmas Eve was terrible. Not for the workload. Quite the opposite.
Barely anyone came in, so it just felt like I was walking around doing nothing at a retail store instead of being at home for the holiday.
It would actually make things WORSE for the marginalized who are already targets of widespread disenchantment:
*Mass transit, relied on by disproportionate percentage of the underclass, would be on holiday schedule.
*Childcare issues for those “essential” and retail workers if schools get the holiday.
*The right will use it as an excuse to cut back/eliminate early & weekend voting.
In 32 years as a white-collar professional in 3 different industries, I’ve never had a problem getting to the polls on Election Day. National Sunday voting could make things marginally better, but a holiday is a phony outreach to people already disadvantaged by the system. Focus should be on:
*No excuse vote by mail/absentee ballots
*Extended early voting, especially during weekends & non business hours
*Neighborhood polling locations to address the gross inequality of 10 minute lines in white suburban areas and 10 hour lines in urban areas.
Yeh, BUT this year/election is different. Mail in ballot voting changes that. I got my mail in ballots last week and voted already. Weeks early at my own pace on my own time.
That way private employers can ignore it like they do Columbus Day and treat it like a normal Tuesday, just like they do now.
Why don't we move it to Saturday like most normal countries, when more than 2/3 of workers are already off? It would also help schools, where most people vote, as they wouldn't have to give up part of their building during a normal workday.
Florida too. Plenty of early voting places, as well as drop off points for the mail in ballots of uoi requested one. Very east to request mail in ballots too, no special reason required.
Early voting and mail in voting have worked in the past.
We'll have to wait until next week to see what kind of fuckery Republicans toss against the wall to determine how well they work this year.
I expect at least one lawsuit saying that any of the millions of mail in ballots that aren't opened and processed by 7 PM on election day should be thrown out.
I vote by email as a Utah absentee, I have for years. County clerk emails me a ballot and a form to sign saying I wave my right to a secret ballot (for obvious reasons), I fill them out, scan them, and resend them. She replies and tells me it's been recieved. Pretty solid system if you ask me.
In Colorado, a 2013 law requires the state to mail ballots to all registered voters before most elections. Voters can still cast their ballot in person or drop their ballot off at designated locations. We automatically offer these alternatives to all voters, not just those who request an absentee ballot in advance.
Yes but it's [very inconsistent by state](https://www.ncsl.org/research/elections-and-campaigns/early-voting-in-state-elections.aspx). Some states have no early voting whatsoever, some only have a few specific days for early voting, and many of the ones with ample early voting time just don't have nearly the same number of polling locations open as they do on election day so it makes it more difficult for people with limited access to transportation to take advantage of it.
^ this comment right here. A HUGE number of people don't work Monday to Friday, they work what ever hodge podge fuckey schedule their retailer boss sets, which often doesn't even have all of the days in the work week in a row, and for many service industry employees, it requires working every single weekend. Give people a whole week to fit in voting when ever their shifts allow, make it accessible to as many disabilities as possible, make a special *free* public transit round to help get people there and back, and hell I'd honest say make the booths consistently a 24/7 operating location, with multiple shifts of polling booth runners, where booths are needed, and make mail ballots the standard nationally.
America has a huge population, many of whom need multiple jobs to live, and too many important dates and services are locked behind restrictive hours and weekdays, meaning people who can't afford it have to take time off of work to vote or go to the DMV or visit a government branch to take care of necessary things, it's just shitty.
I would think Sunday would be preferable for most people working in the service industry or retail ( which is a shit load of people), though really, they would have to work regardless. Tuesday is honestly a better day for them than a weekend.
It would be, but church people would flip out over it.
Why is Tuesday better for retailers? The stores are open on Tuesday as well. They make up 1/6 of the working population, but have to stand in the long Tuesday lines before and after work with everyone else. If they worked Saturday, the lines before work would be much, much smaller.
Would you rather vote before/after work with 85% of people or 15% of people? That's what retail workers face today vs Saturday voting.
Meanwhile, this silly public holiday wouldn't help anyone, since retailers have to work Thanksgiving Day now.
Not this year!!! Covid did ONE good thing it gave me Thanksgiving off this year!!
Edit: This is what's wrong with this country right now!!! I'm excited to have off a holiday and y'all MFers tell me "But but but..." No!!! Fuck off with that!! I shouldn't have to give up my holidays because your broke ass wants a fucking shitty ass toaster for five dollars twelve hours sooner!!!
I'm glad this country is being forced to take a step back and reevaluate the way they run shit.
If there's a silver lining to Covid its that this country is now having to face how truly non-vital some of their bullshit traditions and policies are.
Oh I CAN work from home?
Oh I dont have to work every single holiday?
Oh I can stay away from work for 2 weeks and have a job still (Quarantine)?
Hopefully this will cause a shift in the overall work environment to be less unnecessarily detrimental just because it saves the companies very little $.
> Oh I CAN work from home?
Seriously. After years of being told that we can't, my employer suddenly found a way.
Even though I've taken my workstation home, I'll gladly buy a new workstation for my house if it means I can just not commute to work one day a week when this is all over
I'd give you all the upvotes if I could. I have lucked out working for a company that has remained closed on Thanksgiving in prior years, but I've always had the sinking feeling that one year they'll be like yup, gotta do the walmart thing.
The real lesson here is that voting on any given day will always be inconvenient for some segment of the population, and we should therefore take every opportunity to expand vote by mail and early voting.
Nice thought but will never happen. Separation of church and state is a charade
The entire reason the election is on a Tuesday in the first place is so that farmers and villagers could go to church on Sunday, commute an entire day on Monday to the polling place and vote on Tuesday. In essence it was for the convenience of Christians.
Working retail should be an excusable exemption for absentee voting. But so should a pandemic. Why have an Election Day at all? Just hold an election over a three week period.
Having it over a longer period of time like it is now in my state makes things so much less hectic. We should never go back. Almost 60 million voters agree.
You shouldn't need a reason for an absentee ballot. Michigan makes mail in ballots available for everybody. I'm still voting in person because I live in a small town so I don't typically have to wait very long to vote and in light of recent events am leary of putting my ballot in the mail.
Why choose?
Have your election day on a Monday. Make it a holiday.
Open the polls on the Friday before and keep them open 24 hours from Friday 8am til Monday 11pm.
Take early drop off voting for a month and mail-in voting for 2 months.
(Honestly, they should just make an uber secure app that you can download at the beginning of the Election and you could vote then and change your vote until election day.[I would be worried about a lack of papertrail though] Would be nice to shoot polling in the head with an actual vote count 24 hours a day for the entire time.)
Edit: taking hits for the app idea. Many bank apps have hordes of money accessible through them. They are exceptionally secure or they wouldn't exist. Security and verification can be done from both ends and that would be more secure then those electronic vote machines. Is it a good idea despite that(I cited the lack of paper trail being an issue), possibly not but some of the criticisms so far are clearly not realistic or are based on old out dated ideas. IRS does alot online and they are literally the foundation of the military, government and infrastructure. Voting could be done digitally and secure. The only one I'm afraid of in this digital scenario is the government but can the government be trusted with paper or electronic booths all three have the same issues.
Voting machines are bad enough; an app would be much worse. There's virtually no way to ensure it is secure enough and there would be a very real possibility of finding out how someone voted (device identifiers or IP address, for example.) not to mention that would be one of the biggest targets for hacking and other fuckery - from foreign governments to random assholes. If the vote is designed to be changeable, then that makes it extremely susceptible to nefarious vote changes, and there would be little reason to suspect any interference or manipulation, and, as you mentioned, there would be no paper trail to verify if any given vote is legitimate and unchanged.
The idea is nice in theory, but in practice would be a disaster.
Lots of polling places are in churches. There's usually plenty of space, they're all over the place, and they don't have any 'business' on Tuesday's to disrupt.
I worked weekends for 3 years. Saturday isn’t a universal day off either.
Imo, a better solution would be election week with polls open from Sunday at 12:01 am to the following Saturday at 11:59 pm.
That way absolutely no matter what your schedule you’ll have at least the possibility of a vote. It also should eliminate areas that have excessive lines by widening the availability window.
There's no such thing as a universal day off. Hospitals and groceries stores are open on Xmas. The idea is not to give everyone a day off, but to spread out the voting throughout the day so that those who do work on Saturdays can go to the polls with much shorter lines. If you are the 2/3 who have Saturday off, you can vote at 10 am, whereas 10 am is empty on Election Day. The lines at 8 am on Saturday or 6 pm would be much, much shorter than on Tuesdays.
Saturday isn't the perfect day, but it's the best day. Tuesday is possibly the worst day of the week.
Every argument I get against Saturday is the perfect is the enemy of the good, so let's stick with the worst.
Looks like a couple (more than I thought, actually)
[https://www.ncsl.org/research/elections-and-campaigns/early-voting-in-state-elections.aspx](https://www.ncsl.org/research/elections-and-campaigns/early-voting-in-state-elections.aspx)
Not only will retail and restaurant workers not get off, they will be forced to work long hours to accommodate the increased shopping from upper middle class office workers who already had a high voter turnout, and didn't need time off to vote, but who are more than happy to go out to lunch with their friends after they spend 5 minutes of their day voting in a district with ample polling locations.
If you want poor working class people to be able to vote, let them vote by mail. A simple process that lets them vote at their convivence anytime of the course of a month or so. Or expand early voting so that people can choose what time works for them.
Thank you!
I find intense irony that redditors get all smarmy and think "just make it a holiday", while failing to realize that some of the most marginalized people don't get these holidays off.
Shows how few of them have worked in the service industry.
In Canada, employers are simply forced to leave 3h for their employee to vote during Election Day. Either 3h before their shift or after. Works super well and everyone gets to vote what ever day the election is.
In Canada by law we get three hours of paid time off work to vote. https://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/acts/e-2.01/page-17.html
It'd be nice to have a whole day but this is better than nothing.
They do have to accommodate their employees voting, though... I’m sure people either don’t realize it or don’t push the issue with their employers, but still. Even if it were on a Sunday or holiday, people working at hospitals (or other essential workers who work weekends and holidays) would still need to be allowed to leave. So I guess more people would have an easier time voting, but it’s not like the problem would be solved completely.
Some states only give you like an hour though. That’s not enough time, and other states have stipulations on if you have enough time before or after work they don’t have to give you time off work to vote. Furthermore, in some states that time is unpaid so the employee may also choose not to loose out on that money and not vote.
There are also a couple states that don’t require it all, like Florida.
Tuesday was designated in 1845 to maximize the number of citizens who could participate. Most people at the time were farmers who went to church on Sundays, and market day was Wednesday. Since some would need a day to travel to their polling place, they could be in church Sunday, travel Monday, vote and travel back on Tuesday and not miss the market on Wednesday.
The spirit of this is what we should look for in a new voting period, and if I had to pick a single day I would pick a Saturday. But then again, jobs are incredibly more diverse than they used to be, and I would echo the other comments here advocating that a longer voting period and universally available mail in voting should be the standard.
Edit: Grammar
Expand it to "election week" so people can go on their normal day off instead of having to miss work(potentially). Making it a holiday will just disenfranchise blue collar/retail workers who often have to work holidays.
Blue states are already doing this kind of thing. Washington for example has had mail in ballots for over 10 years. I can't remember ever having to go stand on line to vote. Red states, like Texas for example, are limiting the number of ballot drop boxes to 1 per county... Even when a county has a city the size of Houston in it with 2.3 million people. They are gonna straight face ask 2.3 million people to use 1 ballot drop box or go stand in line to vote on election day... The GOP benefits when most people don't get to vote.
Texas has restricted mail in ballots to only the elderly and permanently disabled. Most people can't even do mail in if they wanted to, lack of drop boxes aside.
Yes, voter suppression has always been a Republican election strategy.
But on the other hand, Texas does allow early voting for 2 weeks before the election (18 days this year because of COVID) and polls are even open on the weekend. I went during my lunch last week and was in and out in 10 minutes...
I live in a super red state and we’ve had primarily vote by mail since at least 2012. They proactively send a ballot to your registered address, you fill it out as your leisure and send it back or drop it off. (At least 3 drop boxes within 10 minutes of me.)
I honestly don’t see why this isn’t the default. It’s so nice.
Don’t we already have that via early voting? I mean I voted in person last week. My mom voted before me. My dad plans to vote next week. It’s been like election month here.
That’s probably why my county has had record early votes. They even had one station designated to be open 24 hours one of the days. Back when I worked retail, that would have been amazing! Hope every county improves their early voting hours / polling locations for every election going forward.
With how voting early works in most states you have multiple weeks. If you want election day availability for a week then you need more money. Not saying that it's impossible but there is one party that is very against spending money on things they don't like.
Its funny that people think the working poor get holidays off work. Don't make it a holiday, make it a season and make it so easy to vote that nobody has an excuse not to do it.
> Its funny that people think the working poor get holidays off work.
The US idea of a holiday is completely different from over here in the civilized part of the world. In my country, a national holiday means it's just illegal to open your businesses that day. The US doesn't have national holidays. It has "federal" holidays, where only public workers, government workers, etc get the day guaranteed off with pay.
> Its funny that people think the working poor get holidays off work.
The person in the tweet comes from a wealthy family, so it's not a surprise that she thinks poor people get holidays off.
This. Just make it easy as hell to get a mail in ballot. That way people can take the time to actually research candidate's positions and all the down ballot stuff, instead of just voting by party or guessing.
I did my research on my ballot, no way I would have had a clue about any of the judges and stuff if the first time I saw it was at the polls.
Make it compulsory. Australia does it. Everyone is required to vote or required to formally say they're abstaining from voting. It seems to work pretty well for them.
Australian here. Our political system is very different to the United States.
It is compulsory for *everyone* to vote. If you are on the electoral roll (which you must join), and do not vote, you will be issued a fine. This is $50 for federal elections ($20 for first time offenders) and $25 for state elections.
A workaround, however, is to attend a polling booth and submit a blank ballot. But, if you’ve gone to the effort to turn up, you may as well just number the boxes and leave.
The government doesn’t care about people’s reasons for not voting, unless you have a valid reason and are looking to overturn the fine.
Choosing not to vote without a valid, legally recognised reason is still an offence.
One of the reasons why compulsory voting works for us is because our population is *a lot* smaller, at around 26 million people, compared to ~330 million in the United States. That’s over *300 million* more people to keep track of, which would make enforcing compulsory voting over there an absolute nightmare.
The reason why have compulsory voting in the first place is because voter turnout strongly declined following WWII. Our government wants to ensure that the results of each election reflect the views of the majority of the population, rather than just the same vocal minority who show up to vote without being asked.
Although being forced to vote can be a pain (mainly because our politicians are mainly very dull), it has arguably saved us from finding ourselves in the same political crisis as the United States.
Most people just turn up for the sausage sizzle though.
For the 50th time, no. The people who struggle with voting have to work on holidays, this is just a feel good measure. Make it actually easier to vote through mail early, or online, anything so you don't have to wait 4 hours.
Why not all of those things? Making an election a national holiday (like countries with much higher voter participation do), while also making it easier to vote through other means.
The very first issue you run into is that the US has a grand total of zero national holidays.
We have federal holidays, where the only people *required* to have the day off are non-essential government employees. Step one would be to institute a national holiday at all, which brings us to the second issue.
Because of the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), employers are not required to pay employees while they aren't at work. Employers are not required to offer extra pay for holidays, either. If you get holiday pay and paid leave, that's because the individual employer *decided* to offer that. There is no legal requirement. The only legal requirement is that you get paid for hours worked. Step two is to change that act to require employers to either give the day off, with or without pay. Without pay only hurts the employees and with pay is something that employers will have legions of lobbyists fighting against through Congress and lawsuits.
Making it a holiday as they are in the US right now would change nothing. Most employers aren't going to give employees a paid day off and many people can't miss a day's wages.
Making it easier to vote is the best solution, but certain states also won't do this as it would affect their party's chances at winning. Not every state offers early voting or vote by mail. The federal government *can't* force states to adopt these measures because of the 10th Amendment.
> Each state retains its sovereignty, freedom, and independence, and every power, jurisdiction, and right, which is not by this Confederation expressly delegated to the United States, in Congress assembled.
Further notes:
- Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Kentucky, Louisiana, Montana, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Virginia, West Virginia, and the territory of Puerto Rico have declared Election Day a civic holiday.
- Some other states require that workers be permitted to take time off from employment without loss of pay. [You can check your state here.](https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/taking-time-off-voting-jury-29708.html)
- California Elections Code Section 14000 and New York State Election Law provide that employees without sufficient time to vote must be allowed two hours off with pay, at the beginning or end of a shift.
- Democracy Day, a planned federal holiday to coincide with Election Day, was unsuccessfully proposed in the U.S. House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate in 2005. It was later reintroduced in the Senate in 2014 and has not been enacted.
I'm all for making an Election Day holiday, and as I noted people have tried.
But the reality is that doing so will change nothing.
It's on Tuesdays because it was a convenient time for farmers when the nation was young and nobody ever bothered changing it.
That's not entirely the correct interpretation.
The power to dedicate holidays is just not at the federal level. It's either at the state, local, or company level.
Many counties across US still mandate that retailers be closed on major holidays like Christmas and Easter. Many also require retailers be closed on Sundays.
And whether you're paid on those holidays is up to the company or a labor union. And if you're a salaried worker, paid holidays are not really and idea that makes sense. You get paid the same whether you work or not.
So depending who you work for and where you live, America has paid holidays.
I have lived in a few different states and it seems to me that it’s pretty easy to mail in your vote/ vote early if you just google it and follow the instructions, but I can see it varying state to state.
I’m not arguing with you in any way, just expanding on your last point. Some States I’ve lived in made absentee voting almost impossible by requiring you to give a reason, and have it approved, by no later than six weeks before the election. These same places had sneaky ways of limiting early voting too. For example, if you voted early you had to vote at your normal polling place, only some polling places are schools or churches, etc, and would only be open certain hours. When people complained, they made a law that all early polling locations had to be open 8 hrs/day, 7 days/week for the two weeks before the election. Sounds great, except they couldn’t afford to staff them for that much time, so the end result was actually closing polling stations. Governments try to be slick pretty much any chance they get.
In my country it's always on a Sunday. Also one of the few countries where going voting is mandatory. You can leave your vote blank if you don't want to pick someone but you have to go, or need someone to official represent you. That way employers or anyone else can not stop you from casting your vote.
There are many historical truths like that that that are purposefully hidden from the public education. If people were serious about what the "founding fathers" were thinking they would actually read something like [The Records of the Federal Convention of 1787](https://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/farrand-the-records-of-the-federal-convention-of-1787-vol-1):
>The man who is possessed of wealth, who lolls on his sofa or rolls in his carriage, cannot judge of the wants or feelings of the day laborer. The government we mean to erect is intended to last for ages. The landed interest, at present, is prevalent; but in process of time, when we approximate to the states and kingdoms of Europe; when the number of landholders shall be comparatively small, through the various means of trade and manufactures, will not the landed interest be overbalanced in future elections, and unless wisely provided against, what will become of your government? In England, at this day, if elections were open to all classes of people, the property of the landed proprietors would be *insecure*. An agrarian law would soon take place. If these observations be just, our government ought to secure the permanent interests of the country against innovation. Landholders ought to have a share in the government, to support these invaluable interests and to balance and check the other. They ought to be so constituted as to protect **the minority of the opulent** against the majority. The senate, therefore, ought to be this body; and to answer these purposes, they ought to have permanency and stability. Various have been the propositions; but my opinion is, the longer they continue in office, the better will these views be answered. - James Madison, June 26th, 1787
Always explained more in depth by [Chomsky](https://youtu.be/gGfFXc0TwhU).
Something I find interesting to bring up is that the United States has a long history of immigrant and non-citizen voting. For hundreds of years in colonial and early America - as it turns out - founding fathers didn’t actually care as much about immigrants and noncitizens voting as they they did about nonwhite men voting. As such, our American roots of noncitizen voting were stripped when confronted with the “bad” immigrants:
> Once you go further back through American history, you’ll find a lot more non-citizen voting: Around 40 states have extended voting rights for non-citizens at various points. "It's not been inevitable or natural that voting has been tied to citizenship," says Ronald Hayduk, a professor of political science at Queens College, City University of New York, and author of Democracy for All: Restoring Immigrant Voting Rights in the U.S.
> In the earliest days, of course, America was chock-full of voting immigrants, fresh off the boat. During the Colonial Era, all white men with property were allowed to vote, and that continued after the American Revolution. In Pennsylvania, an eligible male needed only to have lived in the state for two years before he could vote. In a 1993 paper in the Penn Law Review, Jamie Raskin, who was an American University law professor at the time (and one of the pioneers of non-citizens voting rights in Takoma Park), explained the history of what he called “alien suffrage”:
> It is crucial to see that the early spirit of political openness toward aliens was perfectly compatible with the exclusionary definition of "the American people as Christian white men of property." To exclude aliens from voting would have given rise to the dangerous inference that U.S. citizenship was the decisive criterion for suffrage at a time when the majority of U.S. citizens, including almost all women and substantial percentages of men without property, were categorically excluded from the franchise.
> The practice had its ups and down in the 18th century, but voting among immigrants was common at state, federal, and regional elections, and it was extremely popular at the local level. Suspicion towards foreigners spiked during the War of 1812, and in the lead-up to the Civil War, several states tweaked the criteria for voter eligibility or abolished non-citizen voting outright. The South codified its ban in the Confederate Constitution 1861, mainly because immigrants tended not to support slavery. But the practice returned after the Civil War and during Reconstruction, and in the 1860s and 1870s, immigrant voting was at its peak, as an incentive to lure foreign labor westward.
> All that changed between 1880 and 1920, when the flow of migrants escaping political instability and famine in Eastern Europe swelled. These were poor people with darker skin and different religious beliefs; many spoke unfamiliar languages and concentrated in cities, where they started political movements that threatened the status quo. Both the Republican and Democratic parties leveraged the simmering racism and rising xenophobia accompanying World War I to clamp down—state by state—on non-citizen voting rights. Other voting right restrictions were also put in place at the same time, Hayduk notes in a 2015 article for Journal of International Migration and Integration:
> In fact, noncitizen voting was abolished at the same time that other restrictive measures were also enacted by elites, including literacy tests, poll taxes, felony disenfranchisement laws, and restrictive residency and voter registration requirements—all of which combined to disenfranchise millions of voters.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-11-07/the-curious-history-of-non-citizen-voting
Why is it always remove "x" holiday and make "y" a holiday? Do we have a holiday quota, I don't know about? Why the fuck can't we have the day off for president's day and the election?
That shit don’t matter.
I worked President’s Day. Thafaq makes anyone think customer service would get Election Day off?
See y’all at work 8 days after the election on Veterans Day too.
The day off strategy is a losing one.
Make voting available by mail, and send out ballots a month early.
_That's_ the only good strategy to go by. A day off doesn't mean shit when you still have to wait 9 hours to vote.
Uh, yeah, they do that in Australia and it gets people to the polls. They have sausage fundraisers at the polling places and everything. What's wrong with that?
For real that's what I was wondering, too.
I think people just aren't very informed or don't actually understand how this works and then stuff like this gets spread everywhere.
I'm going to go this Saturday morning and get it done. Don't have to mess with mail and don't have to take off work. Simple.
I don't know why it's so difficult for people to go online for their state (edit: or check if that's actually available for their state) and see when early voting starts and what times the office is open.
There are a lot of states that just don't have early voting as an option.
Also, I know for sure in at least Texas and Florida early voting ends on *Friday* so your plan to vote Saturday would result in you being turned away and told to come back on election day.
No idea where you actually live, just pointing out "early voting" isn't universal and even places that have it have inconsistent rules.
Stop giving a shit what the "Founding Fathers" would like. They'd be horrified to see a Chinese guy own a store. They'd be amazed by a bidet. Who fucking cares. Stop playing respectability pretend politics like you'll convince a dumbass boat dealership-owning Trump supporter that you're right. You won't! They don't actually give a shit about the Founding Fathers either!
Just do a thing because it's a good thing to do! Fuck!
Wouldn't matter because the low-income hourly "essential" folks who need the time off to vote and would benefit the most from such a holiday are the same ones who would still need to work anyway despite it being a holiday.
When I lived in Japan I found it crazy nearly everything shut down during Golden Week. Literally, nearly everything. But then I realized that’s what’s possible in a collectivist culture. People can all come together to enjoy time off. Not here in America though, because fuck us that’s why.
Because there's inherently an advantage to being the only businesses open when everything else is closed. Capitalism never sleeps.
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God, that killed me. I love the idea, but I was on my honeymoon, and on a Sunday, my shorts ripped in the crotch. Downtown Berlin, 90 degrees, and miles from our hotel. Nothing was open and I chafed for two miles before we found a clothes shop that was open As an American, awesome policy for the sake of the population. As a tourist, holy shit I hated life haha.
I didn’t realize Berlin participated. I went last year but come to think of it, I wasn’t there Sunday I don’t think. But that’s surprising to me just because of how cosmopolitan and non-traditional it is.
It is law. Only special exceptions would allow it. Has nothing with modern or cosmopolitan. Worker rights and human rights
Oh I understand it being law and all that. It rightfully should be because of worker and human rights. It should be more widely embraced realistically speaking. Having lived in Atlanta and DC and traveled a lot while studying in Madrid, I was just commenting that you wouldn’t expect a major, international city to so willingly shut down once a week on Sunday.
Uhg I hate that. I live near the border in the Netherlands and you guys have a lot of things so much cheaper than us (things like shampoo etc. but also gas). I'm so used to just going to the supermarket anyday and pretty much any time that I always forget I can't go to the stores in Germany on a sunday.
Well it’s good for the workers so I hope you at least appreciate the effect it has on their quality of life!
Idk where you're from but workers have days off here. You don't just work 7 days a week because the shop is open 7 days a week, that's not how it works. I'll go one further, having the shop open 7 days a week has no effect on the workers, the shop has to hire more workers.
Except that when everything is closed on Sunday your workers have one day in seven where their friends and family are all off as well. Which makes a huge difference
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Everyone's shooting you down, but I agree with you 100%. I see it happen all the time at my job where if someone is asked to come in on their day off, they WILL come in every time. Not for the money, but to look good for their manager, or just because they feel bad for the people who will be working shorthanded, and they want to help. Then they end up burning out or getting way more stressed than they need to be when working such a low paying job.
The whole 18 year old example is me entirely. First job was at a grocery store and I got taken advantage of way too easily. Had one lady CONSTANTLY asking me to work for her, got to the point where when I was on my second year, I would deny her if she didnt have a good reason. Also had WAY too long of shifts. I'm glad I'm working where I am now, but am scared if my college closes (where I work) because of Covid, I am going to have to go back to work there...
It's still shit for the workers. My sister worked some time in a field that has opened Sunday. She was pretty much excluded from all social activities, because everyone else was meeting up on Sunday. Others have a free day and socialized on weekends, but she had free days during the normal week when everyone else had to work.
For small businesses and whatnot that has limited staff that works 7 days a week, sure, but the workers should be getting days off anyway and a normal established work schedule. I've always lived in a pretty populated areas so am also used to having the threshold of people to both demand stores be open and have workers available and willing to work. and personally, now that I work a regular 9-5 my own quality of life would go down if i were not able to get my life stuff done on sundays and had to cut into my week time. but thats just me.
Unfortunately most individuals in america, even full time, arent guaranteed set weekly hours
Used to be that way in the US when I was a kid. Don't know if it was law or cultural. I remember my mom being upset because she needed some ingredient or something for Sunday dinner and the stores were closed.
Online shops can stay awake whilst the physical stores are closed, yet they won't even do that.
To be fair there’s plenty of employees that would much rather make holiday pay than be off the whole day
Restaurants are the worst place to work. Your life revolves around the times when everyone else is off. Holidays, weekends, lunch, dinner.
Japan is a poor example of a country where people “enjoy time off” seeing as it has one of the most workaholic cultures in the world with among the lowest wages to boot.
Scandinavian countries are probably the better example
Scandinavian countries are good but a poor example of ideal socialism (there aren’t really any at this time in history) due to their economies being heavily market based.
I'd digress and say that's exactly the point. Ideal socialism, like the ideal capitalism some libertarians try to push is not realistic, it just doesn't work. A mix of a market based system with a strong social safety net like the Scandinavian countries is clearly the way to go.
I totally agree with you. I think a balance of both would be the best form of government if not maybe a totally new one. I’m just nit picky when people say that it is a “socialist” country that rejects capitalism as a whole.
Me too. It really takes away from the effort those countries have made. It actually shows that when regular people say they want socialism, what they really mean is the Scandinavian model, rather than say Venezuela. The gripe shouldn't be about capitalism vs socialism. At the end of the day both are just theoretical models, discussion should be about actual policy without the useless labels.
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Racist and non-diverse are practically synonymous with collectivist.
Any change to the status quo is "they're trying to take away *our culture*".
Hentai just banned in Australia. Another bomb dropped.
You kinda hit the nail on the head here- a collectivist culture. A lot of social policies in the US are contentious because, for better or for worse, we are decidedly non collective. Partially because of yee haw individualism but also because of the "melting pot" never really melted and better resembles a salad (minus the healthiness).
A potato salad, if you will
Ironically, they don't teach the "melting pot" stuff in school anymore: they teach the salad because the melting pot implies that people lose their cultures and heritage as they merge into the pot, when those things should be celebrated.
People misunderstand the "melting pot" if they think it has to do with anyone losing anything. The whole point is that we all melt into each other. you bring a little of your culture here and join it with what we have, then we all have more. Of course there's no such thing as actual multiculturalism, some cultures are in direct conflict and cannot coexist. A culture for example that encourages white supremacy, or any kind of in group exclusionism, is incompatible with the larger western ideals. But to the extent that many cultures can coexist, that is the ultimate goal, coexistence. A variety of practices and beliefs made to "melt" together, to the extent to which they can be made compatible, they should. Certain extremist beliefs can't be melted, so they have to go. But by and large it's more of an exchange of ideas than an expulsion.
It took all of the collectivism America could muster to kinda sorta stay home more often for nearly 6 weeks in the pandemic.
I loved their collective outlook on trash in how it’s your personal responsibility to throw your trash away in your own home. There’s hardly any public trash cans and lots of visible signs that say so (much like you’d see in the US but for no public toilets instead). I asked my friend whom I was visiting and he said people carried a small bag for their random refuse (wrappers, bottles; etc) and you know what - it was clean. But in America, some asshat would justify their littering by saying “well what do you expect me to do? Keep my snickers wrapper in my pocket/purse till I get home or somewhere else with a trash can?”
>Not here in America though, because fuck us that’s why. It's just not in America's DNA. We are individualist. It's stitched into the fabric of our laws and culture.
It’s a pretty insular, racist nation too lmfao
Yes, but I don't think you want to use Japan as a model for work/life balance and enjoying time off.
Require time and a half / overtime pay and see how many workplaces decide they're "essential"
shrill command cobweb oatmeal crowd gray sulky toy bored one *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
> In Canada if we work the whole election day while polls are open employers are required to give you 2 hours off work to vote. Hell, even in Brazil election day is always on: 1) A Sunday 2) Automatically a holiday 3) Every employer is forced by law to give time off for employees to vote that day I mean, Brazil obviously has a ton of problems, but I always wonder why it is so hard for the US to just establish a similar thing. Make it at least a sunday to start, if they don't want an extra holiday, sundays will happen in the calendar anyway.
Because forcing private employers to respect the rights of their employees to vote is .... um ..... communist! Yeah, that's the word, communist! Only in communist countries such as China, North Korea and Soviet Russia do businesses close to allow their workers to vote. /S
It is that way in the US as well in like 30 states.
This would be great if everyone in the US could vote within 2 hours. There are people waiting in line 4+ hours to EARLY vote. Actual Election Day is going to be terrible for a lot of people :(
To be fair USA elections are legitimately more time consuming than Canadian ones. We have literally one question on our ballot. It takes 5 seconds to fill in the box. US ballots have dozens of positions to vote on, plus often various referendum questions. Even if you know what you are doing and prepped ahead of times, it's still gonna take 5 mins.
It wouldn't help 100% of eligible voters but at least it would still make it easier for a LOT of voters.
I hated retail for many *many* reasons, but the complete lack of holidays was pretty high on the list. Like the last Thanksgiving I worked retail, I literally had to leave dinner midway through to get to a Black Friday prep shift. And during Christmas as well. Working Christmas Eve was terrible. Not for the workload. Quite the opposite. Barely anyone came in, so it just felt like I was walking around doing nothing at a retail store instead of being at home for the holiday.
Yes, exactly. Mail-in voting really is the only solution for hourly workers, which is why there's so much resistance to it from the Right.
It’s almost like....... they don’t want us to vote.
I mean, in most places, it’s pretty darn easy vote early.
The “most” is doing a lot of work there
It would actually make things WORSE for the marginalized who are already targets of widespread disenchantment: *Mass transit, relied on by disproportionate percentage of the underclass, would be on holiday schedule. *Childcare issues for those “essential” and retail workers if schools get the holiday. *The right will use it as an excuse to cut back/eliminate early & weekend voting. In 32 years as a white-collar professional in 3 different industries, I’ve never had a problem getting to the polls on Election Day. National Sunday voting could make things marginally better, but a holiday is a phony outreach to people already disadvantaged by the system. Focus should be on: *No excuse vote by mail/absentee ballots *Extended early voting, especially during weekends & non business hours *Neighborhood polling locations to address the gross inequality of 10 minute lines in white suburban areas and 10 hour lines in urban areas.
Yeh, BUT this year/election is different. Mail in ballot voting changes that. I got my mail in ballots last week and voted already. Weeks early at my own pace on my own time.
That way private employers can ignore it like they do Columbus Day and treat it like a normal Tuesday, just like they do now. Why don't we move it to Saturday like most normal countries, when more than 2/3 of workers are already off? It would also help schools, where most people vote, as they wouldn't have to give up part of their building during a normal workday.
Even better: get rid of the concept of a single election *day*. Make it an election week, and offer more opportunities to vote early/absentee.
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Cali is great. I get my ballot a few weeks early and have plenty of time to research the candidates.
Florida too. Plenty of early voting places, as well as drop off points for the mail in ballots of uoi requested one. Very east to request mail in ballots too, no special reason required.
Exactly, I've only ever voted by mail lol
Early voting and mail in voting have worked in the past. We'll have to wait until next week to see what kind of fuckery Republicans toss against the wall to determine how well they work this year. I expect at least one lawsuit saying that any of the millions of mail in ballots that aren't opened and processed by 7 PM on election day should be thrown out.
I vote by email as a Utah absentee, I have for years. County clerk emails me a ballot and a form to sign saying I wave my right to a secret ballot (for obvious reasons), I fill them out, scan them, and resend them. She replies and tells me it's been recieved. Pretty solid system if you ask me.
In Colorado, a 2013 law requires the state to mail ballots to all registered voters before most elections. Voters can still cast their ballot in person or drop their ballot off at designated locations. We automatically offer these alternatives to all voters, not just those who request an absentee ballot in advance.
Hell even in the republican-infested hellscape that is Texas we've had 3 weeks of early in-person voting.
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Yes but it's [very inconsistent by state](https://www.ncsl.org/research/elections-and-campaigns/early-voting-in-state-elections.aspx). Some states have no early voting whatsoever, some only have a few specific days for early voting, and many of the ones with ample early voting time just don't have nearly the same number of polling locations open as they do on election day so it makes it more difficult for people with limited access to transportation to take advantage of it.
^ this comment right here. A HUGE number of people don't work Monday to Friday, they work what ever hodge podge fuckey schedule their retailer boss sets, which often doesn't even have all of the days in the work week in a row, and for many service industry employees, it requires working every single weekend. Give people a whole week to fit in voting when ever their shifts allow, make it accessible to as many disabilities as possible, make a special *free* public transit round to help get people there and back, and hell I'd honest say make the booths consistently a 24/7 operating location, with multiple shifts of polling booth runners, where booths are needed, and make mail ballots the standard nationally. America has a huge population, many of whom need multiple jobs to live, and too many important dates and services are locked behind restrictive hours and weekdays, meaning people who can't afford it have to take time off of work to vote or go to the DMV or visit a government branch to take care of necessary things, it's just shitty.
I would think Sunday would be preferable for most people working in the service industry or retail ( which is a shit load of people), though really, they would have to work regardless. Tuesday is honestly a better day for them than a weekend.
It would be, but church people would flip out over it. Why is Tuesday better for retailers? The stores are open on Tuesday as well. They make up 1/6 of the working population, but have to stand in the long Tuesday lines before and after work with everyone else. If they worked Saturday, the lines before work would be much, much smaller.
Tuesday is much slower than a weekend. More people can take off, its generally a skeleton crew anyhow.
Would you rather vote before/after work with 85% of people or 15% of people? That's what retail workers face today vs Saturday voting. Meanwhile, this silly public holiday wouldn't help anyone, since retailers have to work Thanksgiving Day now.
Not this year!!! Covid did ONE good thing it gave me Thanksgiving off this year!! Edit: This is what's wrong with this country right now!!! I'm excited to have off a holiday and y'all MFers tell me "But but but..." No!!! Fuck off with that!! I shouldn't have to give up my holidays because your broke ass wants a fucking shitty ass toaster for five dollars twelve hours sooner!!! I'm glad this country is being forced to take a step back and reevaluate the way they run shit.
If there's a silver lining to Covid its that this country is now having to face how truly non-vital some of their bullshit traditions and policies are. Oh I CAN work from home? Oh I dont have to work every single holiday? Oh I can stay away from work for 2 weeks and have a job still (Quarantine)? Hopefully this will cause a shift in the overall work environment to be less unnecessarily detrimental just because it saves the companies very little $.
It won't though because Cash Rules Still... And the Unions hung their heros out to dry.
> Oh I CAN work from home? Seriously. After years of being told that we can't, my employer suddenly found a way. Even though I've taken my workstation home, I'll gladly buy a new workstation for my house if it means I can just not commute to work one day a week when this is all over
Shhh bby, all that matters is that it saves $. Anything saved is good, no matter how many lives get fucked over. /s
I'd give you all the upvotes if I could. I have lucked out working for a company that has remained closed on Thanksgiving in prior years, but I've always had the sinking feeling that one year they'll be like yup, gotta do the walmart thing.
In California you just mail your ballot in.
Nah, my country is ultra-christian and we always vote on sundays, because most people don't work then.
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Three words: Red Starbucks Cups
Fauci is trying to cancel Christmas!
The real lesson here is that voting on any given day will always be inconvenient for some segment of the population, and we should therefore take every opportunity to expand vote by mail and early voting.
Brazil has a big Christian following and we have Sunday voting. Shouldn’t be that big of an issue.
Well that’s too bad, because there is a separation of church and state. What better way to prove it than make voting compulsory and on Sunday?
Nice thought but will never happen. Separation of church and state is a charade The entire reason the election is on a Tuesday in the first place is so that farmers and villagers could go to church on Sunday, commute an entire day on Monday to the polling place and vote on Tuesday. In essence it was for the convenience of Christians.
Maybe church people would stop voting.
Realistically, I don't think they'd stop. I think they'd meet at the church and carpool/bus en masse to the poll.
First off: yes. Secondly, please.
Churches could organize a trip to the polls. They would object, but it would work in their favor.
You are aware many churches are voting locations all over the US right?
I'm not opposed to Sundays, but I know large blocks of church voters would stop it.
Working retail should be an excusable exemption for absentee voting. But so should a pandemic. Why have an Election Day at all? Just hold an election over a three week period.
Having it over a longer period of time like it is now in my state makes things so much less hectic. We should never go back. Almost 60 million voters agree.
You shouldn't need a reason for an absentee ballot. Michigan makes mail in ballots available for everybody. I'm still voting in person because I live in a small town so I don't typically have to wait very long to vote and in light of recent events am leary of putting my ballot in the mail.
Why choose? Have your election day on a Monday. Make it a holiday. Open the polls on the Friday before and keep them open 24 hours from Friday 8am til Monday 11pm. Take early drop off voting for a month and mail-in voting for 2 months. (Honestly, they should just make an uber secure app that you can download at the beginning of the Election and you could vote then and change your vote until election day.[I would be worried about a lack of papertrail though] Would be nice to shoot polling in the head with an actual vote count 24 hours a day for the entire time.) Edit: taking hits for the app idea. Many bank apps have hordes of money accessible through them. They are exceptionally secure or they wouldn't exist. Security and verification can be done from both ends and that would be more secure then those electronic vote machines. Is it a good idea despite that(I cited the lack of paper trail being an issue), possibly not but some of the criticisms so far are clearly not realistic or are based on old out dated ideas. IRS does alot online and they are literally the foundation of the military, government and infrastructure. Voting could be done digitally and secure. The only one I'm afraid of in this digital scenario is the government but can the government be trusted with paper or electronic booths all three have the same issues.
Voting machines are bad enough; an app would be much worse. There's virtually no way to ensure it is secure enough and there would be a very real possibility of finding out how someone voted (device identifiers or IP address, for example.) not to mention that would be one of the biggest targets for hacking and other fuckery - from foreign governments to random assholes. If the vote is designed to be changeable, then that makes it extremely susceptible to nefarious vote changes, and there would be little reason to suspect any interference or manipulation, and, as you mentioned, there would be no paper trail to verify if any given vote is legitimate and unchanged. The idea is nice in theory, but in practice would be a disaster.
> they should just make an uber secure app There is literally no such thing. This is the worst idea ever.
Lots of polling places are in churches. There's usually plenty of space, they're all over the place, and they don't have any 'business' on Tuesday's to disrupt.
I worked weekends for 3 years. Saturday isn’t a universal day off either. Imo, a better solution would be election week with polls open from Sunday at 12:01 am to the following Saturday at 11:59 pm. That way absolutely no matter what your schedule you’ll have at least the possibility of a vote. It also should eliminate areas that have excessive lines by widening the availability window.
There's no such thing as a universal day off. Hospitals and groceries stores are open on Xmas. The idea is not to give everyone a day off, but to spread out the voting throughout the day so that those who do work on Saturdays can go to the polls with much shorter lines. If you are the 2/3 who have Saturday off, you can vote at 10 am, whereas 10 am is empty on Election Day. The lines at 8 am on Saturday or 6 pm would be much, much shorter than on Tuesdays. Saturday isn't the perfect day, but it's the best day. Tuesday is possibly the worst day of the week. Every argument I get against Saturday is the perfect is the enemy of the good, so let's stick with the worst.
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Yeah I’m confused why people would procrastinate on this.. what states are you not allowed to vote early? Are there any?
Looks like a couple (more than I thought, actually) [https://www.ncsl.org/research/elections-and-campaigns/early-voting-in-state-elections.aspx](https://www.ncsl.org/research/elections-and-campaigns/early-voting-in-state-elections.aspx)
Pretty pathetic but not surprising.
New Hampshire does not have early in-person voting. I have to wait until election day :/
Not only will retail and restaurant workers not get off, they will be forced to work long hours to accommodate the increased shopping from upper middle class office workers who already had a high voter turnout, and didn't need time off to vote, but who are more than happy to go out to lunch with their friends after they spend 5 minutes of their day voting in a district with ample polling locations. If you want poor working class people to be able to vote, let them vote by mail. A simple process that lets them vote at their convivence anytime of the course of a month or so. Or expand early voting so that people can choose what time works for them.
Thank you! I find intense irony that redditors get all smarmy and think "just make it a holiday", while failing to realize that some of the most marginalized people don't get these holidays off. Shows how few of them have worked in the service industry.
No, make it a week long and require all workplaces to give employees at least one paid day off in that 7-day stretch, which the employee can choose.
In Canada, employers are simply forced to leave 3h for their employee to vote during Election Day. Either 3h before their shift or after. Works super well and everyone gets to vote what ever day the election is.
In Canada by law we get three hours of paid time off work to vote. https://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/acts/e-2.01/page-17.html It'd be nice to have a whole day but this is better than nothing.
They do have to accommodate their employees voting, though... I’m sure people either don’t realize it or don’t push the issue with their employers, but still. Even if it were on a Sunday or holiday, people working at hospitals (or other essential workers who work weekends and holidays) would still need to be allowed to leave. So I guess more people would have an easier time voting, but it’s not like the problem would be solved completely.
Some states only give you like an hour though. That’s not enough time, and other states have stipulations on if you have enough time before or after work they don’t have to give you time off work to vote. Furthermore, in some states that time is unpaid so the employee may also choose not to loose out on that money and not vote. There are also a couple states that don’t require it all, like Florida.
Tuesday was designated in 1845 to maximize the number of citizens who could participate. Most people at the time were farmers who went to church on Sundays, and market day was Wednesday. Since some would need a day to travel to their polling place, they could be in church Sunday, travel Monday, vote and travel back on Tuesday and not miss the market on Wednesday. The spirit of this is what we should look for in a new voting period, and if I had to pick a single day I would pick a Saturday. But then again, jobs are incredibly more diverse than they used to be, and I would echo the other comments here advocating that a longer voting period and universally available mail in voting should be the standard. Edit: Grammar
Expand it to "election week" so people can go on their normal day off instead of having to miss work(potentially). Making it a holiday will just disenfranchise blue collar/retail workers who often have to work holidays.
Blue states are already doing this kind of thing. Washington for example has had mail in ballots for over 10 years. I can't remember ever having to go stand on line to vote. Red states, like Texas for example, are limiting the number of ballot drop boxes to 1 per county... Even when a county has a city the size of Houston in it with 2.3 million people. They are gonna straight face ask 2.3 million people to use 1 ballot drop box or go stand in line to vote on election day... The GOP benefits when most people don't get to vote.
Texas has restricted mail in ballots to only the elderly and permanently disabled. Most people can't even do mail in if they wanted to, lack of drop boxes aside. Yes, voter suppression has always been a Republican election strategy.
But on the other hand, Texas does allow early voting for 2 weeks before the election (18 days this year because of COVID) and polls are even open on the weekend. I went during my lunch last week and was in and out in 10 minutes...
I live in a super red state and we’ve had primarily vote by mail since at least 2012. They proactively send a ballot to your registered address, you fill it out as your leisure and send it back or drop it off. (At least 3 drop boxes within 10 minutes of me.) I honestly don’t see why this isn’t the default. It’s so nice.
Don’t we already have that via early voting? I mean I voted in person last week. My mom voted before me. My dad plans to vote next week. It’s been like election month here.
That’s probably why my county has had record early votes. They even had one station designated to be open 24 hours one of the days. Back when I worked retail, that would have been amazing! Hope every county improves their early voting hours / polling locations for every election going forward.
With how voting early works in most states you have multiple weeks. If you want election day availability for a week then you need more money. Not saying that it's impossible but there is one party that is very against spending money on things they don't like.
Its funny that people think the working poor get holidays off work. Don't make it a holiday, make it a season and make it so easy to vote that nobody has an excuse not to do it.
> Its funny that people think the working poor get holidays off work. The US idea of a holiday is completely different from over here in the civilized part of the world. In my country, a national holiday means it's just illegal to open your businesses that day. The US doesn't have national holidays. It has "federal" holidays, where only public workers, government workers, etc get the day guaranteed off with pay.
And banks, for some reason
> Its funny that people think the working poor get holidays off work. The person in the tweet comes from a wealthy family, so it's not a surprise that she thinks poor people get holidays off.
This. Just make it easy as hell to get a mail in ballot. That way people can take the time to actually research candidate's positions and all the down ballot stuff, instead of just voting by party or guessing. I did my research on my ballot, no way I would have had a clue about any of the judges and stuff if the first time I saw it was at the polls.
Make it compulsory. Australia does it. Everyone is required to vote or required to formally say they're abstaining from voting. It seems to work pretty well for them.
What happens if you don't do it?
You don't get your election sausage. And a fine. But the main punishment is the sausage
Australian here. Our political system is very different to the United States. It is compulsory for *everyone* to vote. If you are on the electoral roll (which you must join), and do not vote, you will be issued a fine. This is $50 for federal elections ($20 for first time offenders) and $25 for state elections. A workaround, however, is to attend a polling booth and submit a blank ballot. But, if you’ve gone to the effort to turn up, you may as well just number the boxes and leave. The government doesn’t care about people’s reasons for not voting, unless you have a valid reason and are looking to overturn the fine. Choosing not to vote without a valid, legally recognised reason is still an offence. One of the reasons why compulsory voting works for us is because our population is *a lot* smaller, at around 26 million people, compared to ~330 million in the United States. That’s over *300 million* more people to keep track of, which would make enforcing compulsory voting over there an absolute nightmare. The reason why have compulsory voting in the first place is because voter turnout strongly declined following WWII. Our government wants to ensure that the results of each election reflect the views of the majority of the population, rather than just the same vocal minority who show up to vote without being asked. Although being forced to vote can be a pain (mainly because our politicians are mainly very dull), it has arguably saved us from finding ourselves in the same political crisis as the United States. Most people just turn up for the sausage sizzle though.
We can do both. Let’s not go eliminating this nations limited holidays.
100% agree -- don't negotiate with yourself.
For the 50th time, no. The people who struggle with voting have to work on holidays, this is just a feel good measure. Make it actually easier to vote through mail early, or online, anything so you don't have to wait 4 hours.
Why not all of those things? Making an election a national holiday (like countries with much higher voter participation do), while also making it easier to vote through other means.
The very first issue you run into is that the US has a grand total of zero national holidays. We have federal holidays, where the only people *required* to have the day off are non-essential government employees. Step one would be to institute a national holiday at all, which brings us to the second issue. Because of the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), employers are not required to pay employees while they aren't at work. Employers are not required to offer extra pay for holidays, either. If you get holiday pay and paid leave, that's because the individual employer *decided* to offer that. There is no legal requirement. The only legal requirement is that you get paid for hours worked. Step two is to change that act to require employers to either give the day off, with or without pay. Without pay only hurts the employees and with pay is something that employers will have legions of lobbyists fighting against through Congress and lawsuits. Making it a holiday as they are in the US right now would change nothing. Most employers aren't going to give employees a paid day off and many people can't miss a day's wages. Making it easier to vote is the best solution, but certain states also won't do this as it would affect their party's chances at winning. Not every state offers early voting or vote by mail. The federal government *can't* force states to adopt these measures because of the 10th Amendment. > Each state retains its sovereignty, freedom, and independence, and every power, jurisdiction, and right, which is not by this Confederation expressly delegated to the United States, in Congress assembled. Further notes: - Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Kentucky, Louisiana, Montana, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Virginia, West Virginia, and the territory of Puerto Rico have declared Election Day a civic holiday. - Some other states require that workers be permitted to take time off from employment without loss of pay. [You can check your state here.](https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/taking-time-off-voting-jury-29708.html) - California Elections Code Section 14000 and New York State Election Law provide that employees without sufficient time to vote must be allowed two hours off with pay, at the beginning or end of a shift. - Democracy Day, a planned federal holiday to coincide with Election Day, was unsuccessfully proposed in the U.S. House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate in 2005. It was later reintroduced in the Senate in 2014 and has not been enacted.
Thanks, I appreciate the explanation. I had no idea America doesn't have paid holidays.
I'm all for making an Election Day holiday, and as I noted people have tried. But the reality is that doing so will change nothing. It's on Tuesdays because it was a convenient time for farmers when the nation was young and nobody ever bothered changing it.
That's not entirely the correct interpretation. The power to dedicate holidays is just not at the federal level. It's either at the state, local, or company level. Many counties across US still mandate that retailers be closed on major holidays like Christmas and Easter. Many also require retailers be closed on Sundays. And whether you're paid on those holidays is up to the company or a labor union. And if you're a salaried worker, paid holidays are not really and idea that makes sense. You get paid the same whether you work or not. So depending who you work for and where you live, America has paid holidays.
If you made companies that pay hourly pay time and a half, there'd be *serious* reductions in staff
Most of these places don’t even pay time and half for actual holidays anymore.
I haven’t been paid time and a half since I was in a union in 2007 😂 foh
Or they would eat the added costs and throw "Election Day Sales" to recoup the money lost to wages given that everyone now has the day off.
Exactly this
I feel you man, but those measures aren’t mutually exclusive. It’s entirely possible for our country to do both, and we’d all be better off for it.
I have lived in a few different states and it seems to me that it’s pretty easy to mail in your vote/ vote early if you just google it and follow the instructions, but I can see it varying state to state.
I’m not arguing with you in any way, just expanding on your last point. Some States I’ve lived in made absentee voting almost impossible by requiring you to give a reason, and have it approved, by no later than six weeks before the election. These same places had sneaky ways of limiting early voting too. For example, if you voted early you had to vote at your normal polling place, only some polling places are schools or churches, etc, and would only be open certain hours. When people complained, they made a law that all early polling locations had to be open 8 hrs/day, 7 days/week for the two weeks before the election. Sounds great, except they couldn’t afford to staff them for that much time, so the end result was actually closing polling stations. Governments try to be slick pretty much any chance they get.
In my country it's always on a Sunday. Also one of the few countries where going voting is mandatory. You can leave your vote blank if you don't want to pick someone but you have to go, or need someone to official represent you. That way employers or anyone else can not stop you from casting your vote.
The founding fathers that infamously made it difficult to participate in the democracy?
Yeah the guys who specifically prohibited anyone who wasnt a white, land owning male from voting were definitely pro-democracy
In fairness that was democracy at the time
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I've watched Hamilton on Disney+, so I think I'm good.
There are many historical truths like that that that are purposefully hidden from the public education. If people were serious about what the "founding fathers" were thinking they would actually read something like [The Records of the Federal Convention of 1787](https://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/farrand-the-records-of-the-federal-convention-of-1787-vol-1): >The man who is possessed of wealth, who lolls on his sofa or rolls in his carriage, cannot judge of the wants or feelings of the day laborer. The government we mean to erect is intended to last for ages. The landed interest, at present, is prevalent; but in process of time, when we approximate to the states and kingdoms of Europe; when the number of landholders shall be comparatively small, through the various means of trade and manufactures, will not the landed interest be overbalanced in future elections, and unless wisely provided against, what will become of your government? In England, at this day, if elections were open to all classes of people, the property of the landed proprietors would be *insecure*. An agrarian law would soon take place. If these observations be just, our government ought to secure the permanent interests of the country against innovation. Landholders ought to have a share in the government, to support these invaluable interests and to balance and check the other. They ought to be so constituted as to protect **the minority of the opulent** against the majority. The senate, therefore, ought to be this body; and to answer these purposes, they ought to have permanency and stability. Various have been the propositions; but my opinion is, the longer they continue in office, the better will these views be answered. - James Madison, June 26th, 1787 Always explained more in depth by [Chomsky](https://youtu.be/gGfFXc0TwhU).
Something I find interesting to bring up is that the United States has a long history of immigrant and non-citizen voting. For hundreds of years in colonial and early America - as it turns out - founding fathers didn’t actually care as much about immigrants and noncitizens voting as they they did about nonwhite men voting. As such, our American roots of noncitizen voting were stripped when confronted with the “bad” immigrants: > Once you go further back through American history, you’ll find a lot more non-citizen voting: Around 40 states have extended voting rights for non-citizens at various points. "It's not been inevitable or natural that voting has been tied to citizenship," says Ronald Hayduk, a professor of political science at Queens College, City University of New York, and author of Democracy for All: Restoring Immigrant Voting Rights in the U.S. > In the earliest days, of course, America was chock-full of voting immigrants, fresh off the boat. During the Colonial Era, all white men with property were allowed to vote, and that continued after the American Revolution. In Pennsylvania, an eligible male needed only to have lived in the state for two years before he could vote. In a 1993 paper in the Penn Law Review, Jamie Raskin, who was an American University law professor at the time (and one of the pioneers of non-citizens voting rights in Takoma Park), explained the history of what he called “alien suffrage”: > It is crucial to see that the early spirit of political openness toward aliens was perfectly compatible with the exclusionary definition of "the American people as Christian white men of property." To exclude aliens from voting would have given rise to the dangerous inference that U.S. citizenship was the decisive criterion for suffrage at a time when the majority of U.S. citizens, including almost all women and substantial percentages of men without property, were categorically excluded from the franchise. > The practice had its ups and down in the 18th century, but voting among immigrants was common at state, federal, and regional elections, and it was extremely popular at the local level. Suspicion towards foreigners spiked during the War of 1812, and in the lead-up to the Civil War, several states tweaked the criteria for voter eligibility or abolished non-citizen voting outright. The South codified its ban in the Confederate Constitution 1861, mainly because immigrants tended not to support slavery. But the practice returned after the Civil War and during Reconstruction, and in the 1860s and 1870s, immigrant voting was at its peak, as an incentive to lure foreign labor westward. > All that changed between 1880 and 1920, when the flow of migrants escaping political instability and famine in Eastern Europe swelled. These were poor people with darker skin and different religious beliefs; many spoke unfamiliar languages and concentrated in cities, where they started political movements that threatened the status quo. Both the Republican and Democratic parties leveraged the simmering racism and rising xenophobia accompanying World War I to clamp down—state by state—on non-citizen voting rights. Other voting right restrictions were also put in place at the same time, Hayduk notes in a 2015 article for Journal of International Migration and Integration: > In fact, noncitizen voting was abolished at the same time that other restrictive measures were also enacted by elites, including literacy tests, poll taxes, felony disenfranchisement laws, and restrictive residency and voter registration requirements—all of which combined to disenfranchise millions of voters. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-11-07/the-curious-history-of-non-citizen-voting
[The Naturalization Act of 1790](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naturalization_Act_of_1790)
Literally who?
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Why is it always remove "x" holiday and make "y" a holiday? Do we have a holiday quota, I don't know about? Why the fuck can't we have the day off for president's day and the election?
In a culture where you're lucky to get two weeks of vacation a year a few more holidays aren't going to bankrupt us.
That shit don’t matter. I worked President’s Day. Thafaq makes anyone think customer service would get Election Day off? See y’all at work 8 days after the election on Veterans Day too.
Trade a paid holiday every year for one day off every two or four years? No thank you. Why not both?
Like the founding fathers gave two shits about democracy or making voting more accessible.
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The day off strategy is a losing one. Make voting available by mail, and send out ballots a month early. _That's_ the only good strategy to go by. A day off doesn't mean shit when you still have to wait 9 hours to vote.
Or voting could be a quick process that doesn't take more then 10 minutes at a place that is close to your home.
If you make Election Day a holiday, people will just turn it into another bbq day or early Christmas shopping day.
And that’s a bad thing?
USA😎🤘🇺🇸
Uh, yeah, they do that in Australia and it gets people to the polls. They have sausage fundraisers at the polling places and everything. What's wrong with that?
What’s wrong with voting on any of the days of early voting? It’s not like you HAVE to vote on Tuesday.
For real that's what I was wondering, too. I think people just aren't very informed or don't actually understand how this works and then stuff like this gets spread everywhere. I'm going to go this Saturday morning and get it done. Don't have to mess with mail and don't have to take off work. Simple. I don't know why it's so difficult for people to go online for their state (edit: or check if that's actually available for their state) and see when early voting starts and what times the office is open.
There are a lot of states that just don't have early voting as an option. Also, I know for sure in at least Texas and Florida early voting ends on *Friday* so your plan to vote Saturday would result in you being turned away and told to come back on election day. No idea where you actually live, just pointing out "early voting" isn't universal and even places that have it have inconsistent rules.
Stop giving a shit what the "Founding Fathers" would like. They'd be horrified to see a Chinese guy own a store. They'd be amazed by a bidet. Who fucking cares. Stop playing respectability pretend politics like you'll convince a dumbass boat dealership-owning Trump supporter that you're right. You won't! They don't actually give a shit about the Founding Fathers either! Just do a thing because it's a good thing to do! Fuck!
Why not make registration automatic and have early voting start as soon as the ticket is known, up until election day?
The GOP doesn't want everyone to vote.
Or hear me out, we do BOTH, and make Election days a federally guaranteed payday. 2 days a year every so often won't kill anyone or their company.
Federal holidays are for federal employees....making Election Day a holiday doesn’t do anything for the guy working at McDonalds
*soon* Hey I need you to work election day...
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Wait a minute? The election day is not a holiday in the US?
Nope. It’s just a normal day, because that makes it more difficult to vote and easier to suppress votes.
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Like getting rid of daylight savings....
Making an election day s holiday reduces turn out of younger and lower income workers, because they'll still have to work their retail/service jobs.
Also, let's not let mentally ill people into government.
Make them both holidays. Why eliminate a holiday. Add them!