We always have the election on a Sunday to maximize number of voters.
Also, voting can of course be posted ahead, and voting can be delegated to an ombudsman if you are unable to attend physically at a voting station.
We don't allow voting through any electronic devices, nor voting over the internet.
All votes are placed using anonymous envelopes. This way no one can trace who you vote for, while still securing that only one vote are placed per person (by authentication at entry at voting station, and manually checked of in a list). All vote counting is manual.
And we don't have a requirement for registration for voters. Voters are registered automatically, based on if you are allowed to vote (citizenship etc) or not.
I would not call a country a democracy if they don't make it easy for everyone to participate in the election.
Having the voting take place when most people are working, or require them to register ahead for voting is not how a democracy works.
Denmark has one of the highest voter turn outs in the world at somewhere between 80 to 85%. Our elections are always on Tuesdays. So I don't buy the idea that voting on a Sunday would yield higher turn outs.
If voters can't be bothered to show up for elections every two to four years, then maybe something else is wrong. Maybe voters don't feel like their vote matter, or maybe you're making it to hard to vote (like in the US where you're not automatically a registered voter).
That being said, voting during the weekend might help avoid queue at the polls, though I never experienced having to wait more then 10 minutes to cast my vote.
>I think elections should be held on weekends giving the maximum number of voters the opportunity to vote.
Nearly one third of the American labor force works on the weekend [1].
Also,
Overall the authors note that night and weekend work tends to be less desirable, as it is often performed by people with fewer skills and employers typically offer a premium wage for it.
In South Africa, elections day is always declared a public holiday. Only essential services workers like healthcare, military etc work on that day. Essential services workers vote before elections. Rest we get a day off. But then again, some people still abstain from elections.
This was actually the original intention of the Tuesday voting day - if farmers were at church on Sunday, and at market on Wednesday, they could only reliably get to their polling place on Tuesday. This reasoning, clearly, does not translate well to a modern urban economy.
The US is in many ways strangely traditional.
EDIT: Replaced folk origin with actual researched origin.
Many counties in Washington State have gone 100% vote-by-mail. Personally, I prefer that solution-- vote when the heck you want, you have several days to fill it in and drop it in a mailbox.
I'm sure it wouldn't be popular in States where there's a big push to check photo ID before voting though.
In Israel they are held on a Tuesday, which is a mandatory holiday for almost everyone, and there's free public transportation anywhere if you need it in order to vote, which is cool (also, most parties would arrange for transport if you call ahead and say you need help and are planing on voting for them).
If held on the weekend it would not allow Sabbath observers to vote. Not sure why Tuesday was picked specifically. Turnout is not that great in recent years though, usually around 60-70%.
Where I live in the US, you have a week before election day to vote in-person early and any voter can vote by mail. Plus the polls are open for 13 hours on election day itself.
I'm all for making sure everyone has the opportunity to vote, but I'm not convinced there are very many people who can't make any of those options work but who could vote if election day was during the weekend.
In Netherland they're neither in the weekend, nor a day off. But voting stations are open really early until pretty late, and usually within walking distance, so everybody generally has a chance to vote.
If not, weekends and days off aren't a great fix either, because some people have to work on weekends or when other people are free. Generous hours and the ability to vote early or authorize someone else to cast are better to give absolutely everybody the opportunity to vote, I think.
I would prefer making it a national holiday since I can not vote it would be an extra day off for me.
Weekends in the US aren't going to get you more turnout anyway. Plenty of the country works on the weekends so it's not a help there and for those that don't, given taking hours out of your already limited free time or using your weekend for yourself, voting isn't going to win out in a lot of cases.
All things equal; doing on voting on weekends would make people in jobs more likely to vote. Which would be an advantage for one party and not the other.
Weekends don't help retail and shift workers, who are least likely to have the leverage to take time off to vote without losing their jobs or even just going hungry due to the loss of a few hours' wages.
Make it a whole week, allow mail-in voting without jumping through absentee ballot hoops, or (unrealistically) require all businesses to shut down completely.
I personally strongly support the Australian method. Make voting mandatory. I'm sure some morons may think that "fascist" or something, but it's objectively the most democratic way to do it.
No provision for submitting votes by any other means other than physically going to election posts(in practice, the government uses schools), entering a tiny makeshift voting booth (which in theory protects you from prying eyes and gives you privacy, but it really doesn't), selecting one paper sheet among the pack you received before entering the booth (one sheer for each political party), placing it in an envelope, sealing it, exiting the booth and dropping it into a box. It doesn't get more analogue than that. Also, there are penalties for those who do not vote - in theory you will be prosecuted, in practice, AFAIK, it rarely happens, but either way, it adds to the ridiculousness of the whole thing (of course the parties want you to vote, and they conspired to force you to vote by making it illegal not to.. This is Greece).
According to this [1] article the abstention rate is near 44% for Greek votes. It seems making it easier doesn't not necessarily make it more inclusive.
Here in the states I always vote absentee. I get my ballot, fill it out, and drop it in the mailbox. I'm not sure how they can make this process easier without it being online or making the postage free.
Well in the US early voting is pretty big so you get basically 10 days to vote. I feel like this doesn't come up a lot (though I still think having election day be a holiday is good)
The real question is why isn't Election Day a mandatory public holiday, for both state and private employees. Even if it was on a Sunday, employees should be required to give 3-5 hours off of work for people working that day.
Perhaps this democracy thing is not considered that important, except for lip service.
There is a certain political party that is harmed by high voter turnout in the USA and is actively engaged in disenfranchising demographics that don't share their worldviews. They certainly will oppose efforts to make it easier to vote.
Cute, but I think there's a bigger issue than just people not voting. Local races, and local issues they can have a dramatic impact, get very little news coverage. So even if you vote, you don't really know what you're voting for. Many ballot initiatives are intentionally confusing to take advantage of this. This is dangerous.
Perfect example, in Texas the Energy Commission is known as the Railroad Commission. These people have tremendous power over oil production and thus our economy... But if you are the average voter who only knows about parties and the presidency, you probably are just voting blind, or you say to yourself, "I really don't care who runs the railroad... didn't even know we still had a railroad... how quaint."
Another great example, the wording on the ballot initiative that banned Uber and Lyft from Austin -- in the exit polls many people thought they were voting to keep Uber and Lyft but in fact voted the opposite of their intent.
We need to do more to ensure that people are aware of the down ballot issues and races -- voting doesn't mean much if people aren't informed and are just selecting candidates based on who's name looks better on the page.
EDIT: Cleaned up typos. Why did I try and write on my phone? Sorry!
A nice gesture, but will the company also give the day off for local elections? Where I live, we just had an election on August 30th for a few very local offices. Local elections have more of an affect on our lives than national elections.
This is so true, and I'm as guilty of it as anyone. Just look at the first sentence of the article:
> This year’s U.S. presidential election is confusing for everyone.
Yeah. Presidential election. That's who you think about, right? Trump, or Hillary, or maybe Gary Johnson if you're like me.
But it's so weird: they have all this other stuff on the ballot! Senators, congresspeople, state assemblypersons, governors, county boards of supervisors, even your mayor and city council members.
And if you're in California, there are probably fifty ballot propositions to worry about too! Who has time to think about all that? It's so much easier to just think about one contest: The Big One.
So yeah, I definitely appreciate your comment. Perhaps now I have shamed myself into thinking about all the more local issues that really do have much more effect on our daily lives.
Living in Menlo Park (CA), this is very real. I look at our neighbors Palo Alto and Redwood City with all the development and activity there. Compare either of those downtowns with downtown Menlo Park and see which ones are hopping and which one ain't. The local joke is that we want to Keep Menlo Dark. It's a nice quiet downtown, where nobody has to bear the burden of running a successful restaurant or retail shop.
Reminder that in America high voter turnout almost always favors Democrats, and the Republicans are very good at gerrymandering and taking control of state governments.
They use this power to restrict voting rather than make it easier, mainly in the name of combating voter fraud, which statistically doesn't actually occur in the first place.
> Republicans are very good at gerrymandering and taking control of state governments
Both sides gerrymander as much as possible. But Democratic votes already naturally clump geographically in a state, causing them to say, win 90% in an urban district and loose 40% in a bunch of others. https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2014-09-08/why-democ...
Most analyses just look at total votes and resultant state representation, while forgetting that most of the effect is a natural consequence of Democratic geopolitics, rather than some Republican superiority in gerrymandering acumen.
> They [Republicans] use this power to restrict voting rather than make it easier
Maybe the media favors that story in the past 12 months, but that is not a trend.
The Voting Rights Act had better support by Republicans than by Democrats. In fact, the Democratic majority had fillibustered the bill in the Senate until the Republican minority leader stepped in.
Remember the voting rights case where a federal court concluded there was "a systematic and deliberate attempt to reduce black political opportunity. Such an attempt is plainly unconstitutional. It replaces a system in which blacks could and did succeed, with one in which they almost certainly cannot...The inference of racial motivation is inescapable."
Whom did that case convict? The original President Clinton.
I think the main reason why Australia has such a high voter turnout is because it's extremely easy to vote. It is compulsory in Australia, but the fine is only $20 (~US$15). Voting always takes place on a Saturday. There are polling booths all over the place, and you can lodge your vote at any booth anywhere in the country. If you know you won't be able to make it on the day then it's quite easy to find a pre-polling station or lodge a postal vote in the few weeks prior to the election.
I wish I could vote every day and have it count. Thankfully this is the case for many goods and services that are provided on the market. If I don't like the product I am getting or where my money is going I simply take my business elsewhere. Providers of goods and services that face market competition are encouraged on a continuous basis to be responsive to consumers or they risk going out of business.
By comparison, voting in elections feels ineffective. Monopolies, even those run by politicians elected every X years, are notoriously bad at serving the needs of consumers. Even if we could vote every day from our phones on who is in charge of a given monopoly, I still don't think it would change much.
With all of the data available around the word (some having it on a weekend, some a holiday) I can't see making a change like this having an appreciable impact on voter turnout.
Besides, say what you want about the US electorate system, but it has not changed much. There are fundemantal problems related to voter turnout, and superficial changes like this really are pointless in the scheme of things.
I've found it easier to either get an absentee ballot or vote by mail, and in a lot of places around here you can do early voting. haven't gone to a poll on election day in a long time.
In Spain we also hold elections on Sunday, but the problem comes when they happen to be in summer on a really nice sunny day. Some people can't be arsed and probably for good reason.
> Interestingly, Morocco was the first country to publicly recognize the United States as an official state with the ratification of the Moroccan-American Treaty of Friendship in 1786. Signed by Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, it recognized Moroccan ports as open to U.S. ships and is the longest-standing unbroken treaty relationship in U.S. history.
Within a decade of recognising the US, Morocco was pirating their ships again, and the US had to pay huge sums to the Barbary corsairs for safe passage - leading to the creation of the US Navy and the First and Second Barbary Wars in 1801 and 1815. Maybe the treaty was never torn up and discarded, but it was broken pretty quickly.
The quote says the treaty recognizes Moroccan ports as open to US ships. Have Moroccan ports ever been closed to US ships? Piracy isn't the same issue.
It violates the treaty for any captured American ship, person, or property not to be restored to America upon docking in a Moroccan port, whether that ship was captured by Morocco or by a "Moor" (in the treaty, Moor seems to contrast with Christian) hailing from any other state.
It specifically does not violate the treaty for the United States or Morocco to wage war against each other, though if one is at war with a third party, the other is prohibited from "accepting a commission" from that third party. It does violate the treaty for prisoners of war to be enslaved rather than ransomed.
It's a little odd to refer to the treaty as having lasted for 220 years, since by its own article 25 it expired in 1836.
The Barbary wars were fought against pirates whose home ports were in Libya, Tunisia and Algeria. Morocco actually gave some protection to American ships. Far as I know Morocco has always been America's friend.
[+] [-] kyriakos|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SNvD7vEJ|9 years ago|reply
We always have the election on a Sunday to maximize number of voters.
Also, voting can of course be posted ahead, and voting can be delegated to an ombudsman if you are unable to attend physically at a voting station.
We don't allow voting through any electronic devices, nor voting over the internet.
All votes are placed using anonymous envelopes. This way no one can trace who you vote for, while still securing that only one vote are placed per person (by authentication at entry at voting station, and manually checked of in a list). All vote counting is manual.
And we don't have a requirement for registration for voters. Voters are registered automatically, based on if you are allowed to vote (citizenship etc) or not.
I would not call a country a democracy if they don't make it easy for everyone to participate in the election. Having the voting take place when most people are working, or require them to register ahead for voting is not how a democracy works.
[+] [-] mrweasel|9 years ago|reply
If voters can't be bothered to show up for elections every two to four years, then maybe something else is wrong. Maybe voters don't feel like their vote matter, or maybe you're making it to hard to vote (like in the US where you're not automatically a registered voter).
That being said, voting during the weekend might help avoid queue at the polls, though I never experienced having to wait more then 10 minutes to cast my vote.
[+] [-] dominotw|9 years ago|reply
Nearly one third of the American labor force works on the weekend [1].
Also,
1.https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2014/09/08/nearl...[+] [-] madiathomas|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gaur|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] azernik|9 years ago|reply
The US is in many ways strangely traditional.
EDIT: Replaced folk origin with actual researched origin.
[+] [-] blakeyrat|9 years ago|reply
I'm sure it wouldn't be popular in States where there's a big push to check photo ID before voting though.
[+] [-] dvirsky|9 years ago|reply
If held on the weekend it would not allow Sabbath observers to vote. Not sure why Tuesday was picked specifically. Turnout is not that great in recent years though, usually around 60-70%.
[+] [-] rainsford|9 years ago|reply
I'm all for making sure everyone has the opportunity to vote, but I'm not convinced there are very many people who can't make any of those options work but who could vote if election day was during the weekend.
[+] [-] mcv|9 years ago|reply
If not, weekends and days off aren't a great fix either, because some people have to work on weekends or when other people are free. Generous hours and the ability to vote early or authorize someone else to cast are better to give absolutely everybody the opportunity to vote, I think.
[+] [-] mhurron|9 years ago|reply
Weekends in the US aren't going to get you more turnout anyway. Plenty of the country works on the weekends so it's not a help there and for those that don't, given taking hours out of your already limited free time or using your weekend for yourself, voting isn't going to win out in a lot of cases.
[+] [-] chvid|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cauterized|9 years ago|reply
Make it a whole week, allow mail-in voting without jumping through absentee ballot hoops, or (unrealistically) require all businesses to shut down completely.
[+] [-] jsprogrammer|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] danielhooper|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eli|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] UlyssesSKrunk|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] markpapadakis|9 years ago|reply
No provision for submitting votes by any other means other than physically going to election posts(in practice, the government uses schools), entering a tiny makeshift voting booth (which in theory protects you from prying eyes and gives you privacy, but it really doesn't), selecting one paper sheet among the pack you received before entering the booth (one sheer for each political party), placing it in an envelope, sealing it, exiting the booth and dropping it into a box. It doesn't get more analogue than that. Also, there are penalties for those who do not vote - in theory you will be prosecuted, in practice, AFAIK, it rarely happens, but either way, it adds to the ridiculousness of the whole thing (of course the parties want you to vote, and they conspired to force you to vote by making it illegal not to.. This is Greece).
[+] [-] matt_wulfeck|9 years ago|reply
Here in the states I always vote absentee. I get my ballot, fill it out, and drop it in the mailbox. I'm not sure how they can make this process easier without it being online or making the postage free.
[1] http://greece.greekreporter.com/2015/09/21/voter-turnout-in-...
[+] [-] rtpg|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] coldtea|9 years ago|reply
Perhaps this democracy thing is not considered that important, except for lip service.
[+] [-] travmatt|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sb057|9 years ago|reply
Time off from work to go vote is already legally mandated.
[+] [-] dbg31415|9 years ago|reply
Perfect example, in Texas the Energy Commission is known as the Railroad Commission. These people have tremendous power over oil production and thus our economy... But if you are the average voter who only knows about parties and the presidency, you probably are just voting blind, or you say to yourself, "I really don't care who runs the railroad... didn't even know we still had a railroad... how quaint."
Another great example, the wording on the ballot initiative that banned Uber and Lyft from Austin -- in the exit polls many people thought they were voting to keep Uber and Lyft but in fact voted the opposite of their intent.
We need to do more to ensure that people are aware of the down ballot issues and races -- voting doesn't mean much if people aren't informed and are just selecting candidates based on who's name looks better on the page.
EDIT: Cleaned up typos. Why did I try and write on my phone? Sorry!
* Explaining Exactly What a 'Yes' and 'No' Vote on Prop 1 Means | KUT || http://kut.org/post/explaining-exactly-what-yes-and-no-vote-...
* Ask the Candidates: Should the Railroad Commission Change Its Name? | StateImpact Texas || https://stateimpact.npr.org/texas/2014/02/24/ask-the-candida...
[+] [-] spc476|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Stratoscope|9 years ago|reply
> This year’s U.S. presidential election is confusing for everyone.
Yeah. Presidential election. That's who you think about, right? Trump, or Hillary, or maybe Gary Johnson if you're like me.
But it's so weird: they have all this other stuff on the ballot! Senators, congresspeople, state assemblypersons, governors, county boards of supervisors, even your mayor and city council members.
And if you're in California, there are probably fifty ballot propositions to worry about too! Who has time to think about all that? It's so much easier to just think about one contest: The Big One.
So yeah, I definitely appreciate your comment. Perhaps now I have shamed myself into thinking about all the more local issues that really do have much more effect on our daily lives.
Living in Menlo Park (CA), this is very real. I look at our neighbors Palo Alto and Redwood City with all the development and activity there. Compare either of those downtowns with downtown Menlo Park and see which ones are hopping and which one ain't. The local joke is that we want to Keep Menlo Dark. It's a nice quiet downtown, where nobody has to bear the burden of running a successful restaurant or retail shop.
[+] [-] unknown|9 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] stesch|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] skylan_q|9 years ago|reply
They determine if there will be a draft or a war or what trade policy is?
[+] [-] malloreon|9 years ago|reply
They use this power to restrict voting rather than make it easier, mainly in the name of combating voter fraud, which statistically doesn't actually occur in the first place.
[+] [-] paulddraper|9 years ago|reply
---
> Reminder that in America high voter turnout almost always favors Democrats
Wrong; the effect is mixed. http://www.factcheck.org/2016/06/sanders-shaky-turnout-claim...
> Republicans are very good at gerrymandering and taking control of state governments
Both sides gerrymander as much as possible. But Democratic votes already naturally clump geographically in a state, causing them to say, win 90% in an urban district and loose 40% in a bunch of others. https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2014-09-08/why-democ...
Most analyses just look at total votes and resultant state representation, while forgetting that most of the effect is a natural consequence of Democratic geopolitics, rather than some Republican superiority in gerrymandering acumen.
> They [Republicans] use this power to restrict voting rather than make it easier
Maybe the media favors that story in the past 12 months, but that is not a trend.
The Voting Rights Act had better support by Republicans than by Democrats. In fact, the Democratic majority had fillibustered the bill in the Senate until the Republican minority leader stepped in.
Remember the voting rights case where a federal court concluded there was "a systematic and deliberate attempt to reduce black political opportunity. Such an attempt is plainly unconstitutional. It replaces a system in which blacks could and did succeed, with one in which they almost certainly cannot...The inference of racial motivation is inescapable."
Whom did that case convict? The original President Clinton.
https://www.justice.gov/sites/default/files/osg/briefs/1990/...
Both sides play these dumb games.
> voter fraud, which statistically doesn't actually occur in the first place.
Probably. While it's often repeated that there are very few "credible" cases of voter fraud, that doesn't necessarily say much.
Remember that George Bush won the presidency in 2000 by 0.009% of the Florida vote. The Democrats were sure counting the beans then.
[+] [-] awqrre|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] metaphorm|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unimpressive|9 years ago|reply
Austrailia 91%
Brazil 78.90%
Britain 66.4%
Canada 68.3%
Finland 70.1%
France 79.48%
Germany 71.5%
India 66.3%
Israel 72%
New Zealand 77.90%
Russia 65.25%
United States 54.9%
[+] [-] davegardner|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Grue3|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] danblick|9 years ago|reply
http://www.findlaw.com/voting-rights-law.html
[+] [-] sausman|9 years ago|reply
By comparison, voting in elections feels ineffective. Monopolies, even those run by politicians elected every X years, are notoriously bad at serving the needs of consumers. Even if we could vote every day from our phones on who is in charge of a given monopoly, I still don't think it would change much.
[+] [-] matt_wulfeck|9 years ago|reply
Besides, say what you want about the US electorate system, but it has not changed much. There are fundemantal problems related to voter turnout, and superficial changes like this really are pointless in the scheme of things.
[+] [-] jrnichols|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] NetStrikeForce|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sctb|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] markpapadakis|9 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] KON_Air|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vacri|9 years ago|reply
Within a decade of recognising the US, Morocco was pirating their ships again, and the US had to pay huge sums to the Barbary corsairs for safe passage - leading to the creation of the US Navy and the First and Second Barbary Wars in 1801 and 1815. Maybe the treaty was never torn up and discarded, but it was broken pretty quickly.
[+] [-] thaumasiotes|9 years ago|reply
edits / further thoughts, having read the treaty ( http://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/bar1786t.asp ):
It violates the treaty for any captured American ship, person, or property not to be restored to America upon docking in a Moroccan port, whether that ship was captured by Morocco or by a "Moor" (in the treaty, Moor seems to contrast with Christian) hailing from any other state.
It specifically does not violate the treaty for the United States or Morocco to wage war against each other, though if one is at war with a third party, the other is prohibited from "accepting a commission" from that third party. It does violate the treaty for prisoners of war to be enslaved rather than ransomed.
It's a little odd to refer to the treaty as having lasted for 220 years, since by its own article 25 it expired in 1836.
[+] [-] rmason|9 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbary_Wars
[+] [-] mohamedattahri|9 years ago|reply