Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. Employers are required to give one of those days off to their employees.
I feel like this fixes a lot of the issues related to time management and not being able to vote because of work (or the stress of waiting in a long line before or after work).
What do you think, if you could implement a solution what would it be?
38 comments
This is not a solution.
Just make voting by mail/no question absentee voting an easy option.
Or, just make the actual day a federal holiday – or move it to a saturday if you don’t want to give people an extra day off – and make mail in voting universally available and easy.
Just let everyone vote by mail and vote early.
You seem to be describing early voting, is that not already a thing out by you?
I was going to be out of town on Tuesday last election cycle, so I went to a municipal office the Saturday beforehand and casted my ballot. I know it’s probably a bit easier to vote in Illinois than Kentucky, but surely you all got early voting or mail in options.
I don’t like it. Right now I’m given 4-6 weeks before an election to vote at my leisure, at any polling place I want. Or I can vite by mail
Or I can wait till day-of.
Going to 3 days is a step backward.
I say yes just for the mandatory day off in there. Make Veterans Day the first Monday in November. You are required to get the day off on either that Monday, Tuesday, or Wednesday.
I think it should be a federal law that employers have to give employees time off to vote. If too many people leaving work on the same day is a problem, then absentee voting should be an option. Work should not impede your ability to vote.
Why three days? Just make election day a national holiday.
You can have a 20 day election, but if your specific area doesn’t have a nearby site that is accessible to regular people during their normal free time, it won’t matter.
My solution:
* Vote by mail excuse free. Indiana has stubbornly resisted making voting by mail excuse free. You have to sign a legally binding affidavit that you are voting early by mail due to one of 12 specific reasons, and ” i want to” isn’t one of them.
* Every county in the state needs to allow early in-person voting with a formula for determining the amount of sites based on population. For a long time, Indianapolis only had one site while Republican counties had several early voting sites. You shouldn’t have a disparity just because you live in a city and blue county rather than a red county.
* Higher election worker pay and longer hours. Closing polls at 6pm makes it hard for many people to get it done on election day.
Y’know, these motherfuckers have been campaigning for 2024 since 2022. We’ve had to put up their constant bullshit for this long and the election is still a year away. At the very least, we could improve election day somehow. Make it a holiday, a three-day event, a week event. Early mail voting in lists. It’s better when as many Americans as possible can participate in their democracy.
Here in NYC, we have early voting and ranked-choice voting since 2021. I voted this year on day one of early voting, along with 9,505 other early voters.
My state has been universal vote by mail for almost 20 years. You have 2 weeks to fill out your ballot, time to research candidates that you don’t know much about (very important for down ballot races), time to discuss with your relatives, etc. Our turnout in 2020 was 84%.
I’m not generally a ‘my state is better than yours’ type, but the rest of y’all need to get it together.
Unnecessary. I think voting by mail and compulsory voting should be implemented.
In the state of Washington it is initially an 18 day event. We get out ballots in mid October and are able to return them immediately.
Ballots with a qualifying post mark are accepted for approximately another 18 days after the election day. Final vote count of uncontested elections are posted the same week as Thanksgiving.
Just have early voting and mail in ballots.
We have 40 days of early voting and you can just register once for mail in ballots by going online, entering your information, and selecting the option so they will deliver them forever.
Lol no silly. If you let people off work to vote then they’ll actually vote. Our minority rule representatives would never allow that.
This seems overly complicated when you can just vote by mail from the comfort of your own home like we do here in Washington. It’s consistently baffling to me why the rest of the country hasn’t caught on to how great it is yet.
I voted in this November election before I left for work on October 31st.
I see little that makes me believe we need to make any changes beyond potentially expanding poll hours and creating some locations where needed.
I feel like most of these proposals are solutions in search of a problem.
I also just don’t agree with the idea that if something doesn’t work for every single person in the country then it needs to be replaced. I was involved in planning my HS graduation and the amount of “Jim! August 25th isn’t good for me. We’ll have to find another day” messages on Facebook I got was insane. I graduated with 500 other people. There wasn’t going to be a day good for everyone but there was enough time for as many people as possible to plan accordingly. I feel the same way about voting. We’re a nation of 330M people. Some people are not going to be able to make it out to the polls no matter how many days off we require. That’s life. Plan accordingly.
It won’t change anything, early voting and mail is the solution like everyone else has said.
The problem is then people outside of the usual suspects will vote and the political class would have to campaign to different people.
Bruh just let me vote online lol
I think it’s a start but it’s not good enough.
Employers are already obligated to let you vote. However, they aren’t obligated to pay you for that time. So even if you let people off of work, they may still rely on that money they’d get from not taking off of work.
On top of that, people have other obligations that may keep them from voting. What do you do with the kids when the teachers have off to vote? It may not be practical to bring your toddler with you while you wait in line for 3 hours. It also doesn’t help the people who can’t get to a polling station because they don’t have transportation.
That brings up another point. Some places will still have ridiculous wait times. I once waited 3 hours in line for early voting! And things will probably get worse because Republicans keep closing polling locations in cities.
It seems like mail-in ballots are the solution and the rate of fraud is virtually zero, despite what some people think with no credible evidence.
We should be encouraging more people to vote. Not trying to make it harder for them. Additionally, I think anybody who knowingly commits a crime involving an election should permanently have their voting rights taken away.
Vote by mail, skip the lines!
One day off.
Three days voting period and eliminate early voting.
I’ve always thought they should do Early Voting at unique places throughout the city/town that people might not otherwise visit.
Not that I would personally be opposed to getting an extra three days off, but I would argue just making Election Day itself a holiday should be sufficient – especially if early voting/absentee ballots are still an option.
In reality, voting usually isn’t that hard if you don’t wait until the last minute. So at a certain point adding additional access leads to diminishing returns.
Why? We’re moving more and more toward mail in ballots or e-ballots. And many states already give employees time off to vote?
I’d rather have the Moon landing holiday that someone asked about yesterday
It only solves some issues, it doesn’t solve problems like child care or transportation. Voting by mail solves all of them.
It should be a national holiday.
Make it a week. People usually have some free time at some point in the week that they can devote to a major event like this. Even for three days, most people will have to break their normal schedule. Make it a week and the person who has to adjust their schedule to make it work will be rare.
Every state allows some kind of early voting. Most states even allow you to vote by mail. Letting election day go for 3 days really wouldn’t solve any problems.
We have an election this coming Tuesday. All elections are state and local, nothing national. Although there might be a special congressional election that I am not aware of. I voted two weeks ago. People can vote early through Saturday.
In Ohio early in person voting started on October 11 by going to your county election board. You could request an absentee ballot from Oct 11 – 31st. The absentee ballot had to be postmarked by Nov 6th. You can even track your absentee ballot on the VOTEOHIO.GOV website.
I haven’t voted in person in a few years. I just vote by absentee ballot. It is easier than standing in line at the polls. My husband stops on his way to work. My ballot was counted Oct 30th.
California has a 10 day voting period. I like our method.
Just have universal early voting and let people vote by mail if they want.
Very stupid to draw it out. Did you see how easy it was for a certain former president to lie about the results just because there are absentee ballots to count after midnight? Imagine what somebody trying to undermine faith in elections will do when it takes three days. If nothing else, one argument against the electoral college is that without it we’d know more quickly who the president is instead of waiting a month to recount Florida, etc.
And as I understand it, your employer does have to let you make time to vote.
Better options to make voting easier: make it a holiday, universal mail-in-voting (some states have it), stop the asinine restrictions such as in my state about not allowing drop-off boxes, or not letting people hand out water to those in line, have more polling places in those areas that have been strategically choked with bad ratios (ie urban black neighborhoods) where the wait has become absurd as an attempt at voter suppression.
I honestly just pity everyone that doesn’t do mail in voting like Washington. I just voted today from the comfort of my couch.
I think it’d be a good idea to require to allow time to do it (all corporate jobs I’ve had specifically provided this) but a whole day off is overkill. You don’t need 8 hours to vote. IME you hardly need one hour
Also, not every worker is eligible to vote. Then you have an HR puzzle of how to allow this without discriminating againt those not qualified to vote
I live in Oregon which has had universal vote by mail for like 30+ years so I know that in my state this would be completely unnecessary.