Reinventing the Presidential Election Day
Think About It as One Way to Save Democracy
It’s come around again: Presidential election season in the Divided States of America. And in our politically divided country, presidential politics have reached new levels of animosity, spending, deep-seated cynicism, hostile accusations, crazy (and not-so-crazy) conspiracy theories, and often, just outright random weirdness.
Grab your bucket of popcorn and your drink of choice! It’s here! Turn up the TV loud! Go to Political Meetups. And most importantly, vote. No matter what, for the foreseeable future, we’ll remain divided, and will not be in a “Let’s agree to disagree” type of mood. Ain’t gonna happen.
One thing both sides might be able to agree on is this: addressing low voter turnout in the United States. Instead of being the world’s example of how a democracy votes, we continue to look flawed and tragically off-track in every conceivable way around every aspect of voting.
When you mix in all the dirty tricks like purging the voter rolls, gerrymandering, voter suppression, and of course, the Electoral College (Which is a flawed outmoded system of rigging the vote, that completely removes the idea of one person equals one vote. If there one thing the Founders got wrong, this is it.), and you understand why we aren’t the shining example of democracy we were taught about in school. Now, add a dash of Russian trolls negatively influencing voters by stirring up our worst prejudices and fears. And of course, stir in the big money that’s pretty much ruined our political system decades ago.
Beyond all this, whether it’s a deep dark feeling of just being over a corrupt political system, media over-stimulation, or just your garden variety voter apathy, every four years less than half of the country decides who’s going become the new president, be the Commander in Chief, and as a bonus gets to redecorate the White House. Oh, and lead the country for the next four years.
If roughly half of the eligible citizens of the United States don’t vote, that means millions of people just don’t seem to care.
What are nonvoters showing by their lack of engagement?
Is it possible that each side represents more or less the same outcome to them?
Really? Is that even possible?
Is everything fine, so voting is an activity not worth bothering with?
Do they think so little of their own lives that the political process doesn’t interest them?
Are these the people who already consider our political system so far broken that there’s no sense in being involved, or are they just waiting for a three-party system to magically spring up?
Would more people turn out to vote if we had proportional representation, so a wider range of voices could enter the system? Now that would be interesting.
One solution to the low voter turnout problem is to make our Presidential Election Day a national holiday, so voters could easily make it to the polls, having a whole day to do so.
Sooner or later, voting will be as easy as going online with your phone and clicking for your candidate, like everything else. Using our digital devices to vote is just common sense mixed with everyday convenience. Would more citizens vote if they could vote from their mobile phones? We are just a few years away from that version of reality, but changing the system for convenience began a while ago. Many states now have mail-in ballots, and at least a third of the results are already in on election night.
As far as doing it the way it’s always been done, there’s something compelling and maybe even rewarding about standing with one’s fellow citizens, and taking part in one of the most anticipated days in American politics. No matter how you vote, you want your vote to count, and you want to feel like you changed history.
One of the things that still works about America is its ceaseless potential to reinvent itself.
Surely we can reinvent the voting for a President process?
At long last, and this point in time, it should be a national holiday. Just the Presidential election, which only takes place once every four years. Surely, workers having a day off to vote wouldn’t be a disruption to the economy, if a day off happened so infrequently. We celebrate presidents’ lives, so why not add a holiday to our national calendar celebrating electing the next president?
Surely, this is something worth amending the Constitution for.
It would be a meaningful change to our constitution. A federal holiday giving people permission to take the day off and vote their conscience, vote their beliefs, and vote with all their heart. Making it a holiday on the calendar would make the Presidential Election Day stand out even more in voters’ minds. It’s already promoted in the years and months leading up to the event. Why not make it an even bigger event? Put up billboards and send text alerts, and transmit a blaring wake-up noise to every radio and TV, just like the Emergency Alert System used to do. What’s that for, a Nuclear War alert? Nah, make a pot of coffee and fry up some eggs, we’re going to go vote for the next President.
Even if the Presidential Election Day holiday only increased voter turnout by 5 percent, that would be newsworthy, and undoubtedly democracy-altering. And, in our recent election cycles, when we’ve had both squeakers and dramatically disputed elections, that’s a huge number to consider.
It’s time. Make Presidential Election Day a national holiday, and reinvent a fundamental part of our political system. What to do have to lose, but the belief in our democracy?
