Why Do Americans Vote on Tuesdays?

Disenfranchised voter = "No ID senior. No habla English."

How do you know I haven't? If you had a 102-degree fever or even tickets for your favorite band, you'd find someone to swap with.

Now I understand why you're one of the principal proponents of photo IDs.

On a grand scale, it's a magnificent idea. I'm just thinking of hackers. Then again, poll workers and their supervisors have been ditching votes for as long as there's been voting, so maybe "Oops, our mainframe's down and we just lost three entire counties" won't be that much worse.

And that's how you guarantee higher voter turnouts and a true sense of enfranchisement.


Just for the record, everyone, I posted the article as a conversation starter. I doubt anyone here would argue that voter turnout in this country isn't abysmal. Any method to improve it is fine by me.

What about putting strippers at the polls? Pun intended.

I know of people who refuse to register to vote because they are afraid of jury duty. As for increasing turnout? That is a hard one. The Bush/Gore election proved that even a few hundred votes can make the difference so the notion of "my vote doesn't count" should be discredited. However, that is largely offset by the the majority of elections won by large margins. I take my kids in to vote with me so that they'll see the process and think it's cool, but also so that they are not intimated by it as I know some people are.
I know it sounds like some old time conservative brain-washing but the notion of civic duty seems to be missing in our schools/youth. Maybe it's due to the increasing skepticism and distrust of each generation of parents or the media focus on celebrities that have people tuned out to politics and issues.

But I say again, the cause of low voter turnout is due to ignorance and apathy rather than the day of the week you vote. Short of making it illegal not to vote, I don't know what to do.

Agree with most of this, and I don't think we want to go to the Australian system of mandatory voting. (But people should realize that DMV records are used to generate potential juror lists, too, so avoiding jury duty is a pretty lame excuse; if they want to find you, they'll find you.)

That could have interesting side effects. But equal opportunity, please - male strippers as well.

The very idea of strippers would compel the prudes/FOXNews addicts/Daytons to stay home in protest.

And gay men would be just as interested in the male strippers as women were, which means homophobes like Flashy won't be voting, either.

Unintended consequences are fun.

Having to register to vote does seem like a huge hassle which can't help with turnout, imho. Is it all about privacy? What about fraud prevention if you don't need to show photo id? Since the government here knows where everyone lives anyway, we get sent our personal voting pass in the mail, together with a list of candidates. You show up with that at your designated polling station, show your passport or identity card, and you get to vote. Do we not care about privacy enough? Could be..
Btw we tried digital voting for several years, not by internet, but using machines. Turned out they were easy to tamper with, so we switched back to paper and pencil.
-edit- internet voting should be possible.. we have digital ID as well...

The having-to-actively-register may be the biggest inhibitor. Somehow the government manages to find every American male just before his 18th birthday to remind him to register for the military. Why can't voter registration be automatic, issued at the same time as the mandatory SSN?

Onsite digital voting (Diebold) was one of the biggest contributors to the kerfuffle in '00. Not only were the machines obscenely easy to tamper with, they also had a tendency to jam. And an exposé by a writer for the NYTimes showed that half the time the machines are stored in unsecured areas like school basements when not in use.

Since '00, of course, voter registration drives have stepped up in a lot of places. Forms that once upon a time you'd have to ask for at the post office are now openly available there and in libraries, etc. In my neighborhood volunteers with forms on clipboards stand outside the supermarkets.

This is, of course, an urban area in a blue state. It's not that convenient for everyone.

Or it could just be that you're retarded. So I'll go slow:

There are seven days in a week.
There are five weekdays.
There are two days on the weekend.
Most people who have jobs to support themselves work more than two days.
So it is perfectly reasonable that those 35% who work on the weekend also work on weekdays.

In fact, if you take that 35% and subtract it from your 82% you get 47%. So it would be perfectly reasonable to argue that 47% of Americans work Monday-Friday while 53% of Americans (which works out to the majority, just in case you didn't notice) work weekends.

Since you're making up statistics, make some up about how people who work on weekends don't work on Tuesdays.

It literally hurts my brain to try and think down to your level. If I understand you correctly, you've just said that it wouldn't be fair to people who work on weekends to keep elections on Tuesdays because they might also work Tuesdays. So instead we should move elections to weekends.

Not really what she said, but warnings to both of you -- math in the Red Room.

Heh. I missed the fulcrum in the thread, where garamet takes an innocent if not entirely thought out idea, digs in, doubles down, and ramps up the Crazy rather than just say "Huh. That's an interesting point. I hadn't considered that."

Clearly you haven't. You said yourself your brain hurt. Not a good starting point.

Not to mention the bizarre idea that it's crucial for people to register at least X days before the election, and the intense resistance to same-day registration from lawmakers who are determined to throw up as many barriers to participation as possible.

Seriously, is there even ONE valid argument against same-day registration anymore?

Most close for Christmas. Provide incentive for them to close on Election Day (tax break?).

This is what gives maths a bad name, and a ban in the Red Room.

I'm not going to go through all the mistakes in that reasoning, but bottom line is this: When you start off with the specific data that overall 35% of all workers work on the weekend, and after some manipulation find out that this could mean that overall 53% of all workers work on the weekend, you're doing it wrong.

Okay, I'm calling bullshit on the register to vote excuse. That's even easier than taking a dump. You verify your address, check a few boxes and sign. Just another excuse for people being lazy.
Being a good citizen means you have to make some effort to participate. "Wah wah, can't I just vote online in my pjs? Wah wah!" Lazy excuse!

EXCEPT when one goes to vote it is usually on one's lunch hour; standing in line for the other is usually done on one's day off.
And if the only income you have is what you get paid per hour standing in line instead of working... it does become a hardship.

Wait...your polling place is near your job, not where you live? How common is that?

A hardship that happens on only one day a year.....for about 15 minutes. Go vote in the morning before work or in the evening after work. No one is forcing you to go on your lunch hour. You have 12 friggin hours! Some places you get 14 hours. What's the big deal?

These are the same people who push for photo IDs. As if having poll workers scrutinize everyone's ID isn't going to slow things up even more. Of course their ultimate goal is to keep "those people" from showing up at all.

I don't see the issue with photo ID either. Most people have one if they drive or you know..function in society. And it also lets the poll worker know if you're voting in the right location. I know it's a hassle to stand there for 20 seconds while they look at it.

The voter ID laws and other "voter fraud" that goes on is just political bullshit. In order to really cheat at the polls and make any material difference in the election results would require massive amounts of people being bussed around to different locations. It's just not logistically possible, especially with nobody noticing.

LizK apparently votes near her job, not where she lives. I'd never heard of that before. There's something that could be ripe for abuse.

She never implied that she votes near her job, just that she votes during her lunch hour.

So, what? She leaves work, drives to her polling place near home, then drives back to work? That makes it even stranger that she wouldn't go before or after work. Why waste the time driving back and forth? What if there's traffic? Guess I'll wait for a clarification from her; it just seems weird the way she worded it.

In any case, voting by mail would solve all of that.

Perhaps she lives close to work.

Could be. But is anything close to anything in Texas?

Yeah, but they CLOSE at 7pm. I work NIGHTS.
So that "hour" plus the driving time has to be done during time when I would be SLEEPING.
So yeah, that hours etc is a hardship.

Sounds like voting by mail would be your best option.

I'd go as far as to have an election period of a couple of weeks. It makes no sense to decide who is going to lead the free world in the course of a couple of hours.