Voting for the Weekend

The New York Times had an interesting piece today on the history of our nation’s Tuesday voting schedule. They first point out that some other countries have much higher rates of electoral participation.

Despite all the money and the news media hysteria, and even with record numbers of Americans heading to the polls, the United States won’t even come close to the top nations in the world for voter turnout. We will be well behind — to name just a few — Iceland, Sweden and New Zealand.

What do those countries, among many others, have in common? Their citizens all vote on a weekend day.

So why do we do this?

The reason we vote on Tuesday makes perfect sense — at least it did in 1845.

To understand the decision Congress made that year, let’s imagine ourselves as members of early agrarian American society. Saturday was for farming, Sunday was the Lord’s day, Monday was required for travel to the county seat where the polling places were, Tuesday you voted, Wednesday you returned home, and Thursday it was back to work.

It’s a safe bet that today most Americans don’t follow the same schedule as our farming forefathers. In fact, for many, Tuesday is one of the most inconvenient days to hold an election. One in four people who didn’t vote in 2006 said that they were “too busy” or had “conflicting work or school schedules.”

Are we really that wedded to Tuesday elections? It’s true that we stretch the hours and try to mandate systems where employers have to allow time to vote, but it’s still nowhere near as convenient as a weekend for the majority of workers. Would a three day voting window be that bad, if it ran from Friday through Sunday? What might be some of the possible drawbacks and repercussions? I’m not sure how it works out to be a negative, but I’ll leave it up to you folks to offer suggestions.