Why don't we have a national holiday to vote?

[LakeVermilion]

Its probably been discussed here a lot, but we really need legislation to get this done. It should be a part of any Democratic candidate's platform.

[Jester Messiah]

1. That would make the oligarchs nervous. [nt]

[kennetha]

2. Damned good question.

By International Standards, U.S. Voter Turnout is Low

[EmperorHasNoClothes]

3. I think requiring at least a week of early voting would be more effective

Even if voting day is a national holiday, some people won't get it off.

[daleanime]

10. One does not preclude...

the other.

[HereSince1628]

4. Just one holiday? Wouldn't we also need--the National Photo ID holiday?

[CincyDem]

5. hahahahahahahahah...sorry I couldn't resist

We don't have a national holiday to vote because, well...then more people would vote.

Active voter suppression via ID laws, polling place "issues", etc are a fundamental Republican strategy.
Passive voter suppression via alienating people from the process or trying to sell false equivalence between the parties (i.e. your vote won't matter) is also part of it.

When people participate in the voting process, the future wins and traditionally, the future favors the Democratic party platforms.

As long as Rethugs control states, this will never happen.

[RKP5637]

6. Agree, and in fact, the entire voting system is obsolete IMO. n/t

[Xipe Totec]

7. It's not obsolete; it is rigged. nt

[daleanime]

11. Yes...

and yes.

[RKP5637]

14. Yep, it is, you expressed it better, it is rigged. n/t

[brooklynite]

8. Which day should be a Holiday?

New York State will have three Primaries and the General election. Do some elections count for more than others?

[daleanime]

12. So three state holidays...

and one federal holiday.

[BlueMTexpat]

9. It's been attempted.

In fact, in 2005, a specifically-proposed Democracy Day was introduced by Rep John Conyers (D-MI) and Senator Debbie Stabenow (D-MI) - yes "Establishment" Dems both. The bill was unsuccessful. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_Day_(United_States)

Dang 'em. Not only have both endorsed Hillary Clinton for President, but they proposed that bill before Bernie proposed a similar bill in 2015. https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/114/s1969

So yes, the need for such has been recognized and legislation has been drafted. Getting that legislation passed, however, is problematic, to say the least. We can still hope.

[daleanime]

13. So we both agree....

That they're batting .500. We just disagree on which ones were hits and which ones were misses.

[brewens]

15. My understanding was that republicans were all about early voting, more polling

places and anything else we could do to make it more convenient for working people to vote. Then they realized it was benefiting democrats more. Seems that a lot of the working people that had been having trouble getting to the poles were a little darker skinned than they had imagined and didn't vote republican.

Now republicans are trying to make it tougher to vote everywhere they feel it will help their cause. Early voting sure helps me get my vote in. I'm a white guy in Idaho. Last election it was really tough to find out when and where to go vote though. I ended up calling the DMV where it had been last time to find out. It had been moved to an adjacent building but I was able to find out the hours anyway.

I wondered if that was planned. It sure seemed like that information should have turned up in a web search somehow.

[treestar]

16. I thought it was

Schools are closed, etc. It's like part of the trend to keep businesses open even on holidays that affects it.

[Nye Bevan]

17. Why not just switch to universal voting by mail?

I've heard it works great in the places that have it.

[Igel]

18. I've heard that the increase is in the double digits in Oregon.

Mostly I hear that from people, sources, etc., that like the idea. They compare it with other states' turnouts, and say that's the reason.

Then I went to the Oregon website that tracks such things, and tried to spot the year vote-by-mail took effect for the general election.

http://sos.oregon.gov/elections/Documents/Voter_Turnout_History_General_Election.pdf. I concluded it had to be 1984, but it was 2000. The 2000 election had average turnout. Lower than some non-vote-by-mail years, higher than some others. What mattered was the details of the election, not the manner of voting.

Hard to spot the significance of vote by mail, entirely or partially, in voter turnout for the primaries.
http://sos.oregon.gov/elections/Documents/Voter-Turnout-History-Primary.pdf . For that the magic year was 1996, but that was below the turnout for the previous 2 decades of primaries.

If you compare vote-by-mail over time, it made no difference in Oregon. But turnout in Oregon was already high by comparison with other states, so the bally-hooed "improvement" is what's called a confound. It looks like it has one cause, but, in fact, there's no clear causal relationship between the two. Perhaps they're randomly associated, perhaps they're both due to the same underlying factor, perhaps there's a feedback loop between them, but it's not "cause and effect" as usually billed. If you pick and choose the right years to average, you can find a spurious link, but that's called data dredging.

[B Calm]

19. To answer your question, REPUBLICANS. They want low voter turnout.