Welcome to brain Stuff, a production of I Heart Radio, Hey brain Stuff Lauren bog obam Here in the United States ranked twenty six in the world in voter participation, with only fifty percent of eligible voters casting ballots and
the presidential election. That's better than the twelve elections participation rate of fifty three point six percent, but still embarrassingly low compared with say, Sweden's participation rate, even though is shaping up to be a year of higher the normal voter turnout in the United States, experts are predicting about sixtent turnout. Certainly nothing like so what's up with that? What motivates people to either vote or abstain from doing so.
Some simply don't like the candidates running in a given year, prefer to spend their time otherwise or else somehow forget that there's an election. But according to a Pew Research Center survey of registered voters who did not cast ballots in the biggest single reason was scheduled conflicts with worker school, which kept thirty five percent of people who didn't vote
from exercising their rights. Of course, there are increasing options in many places, such as mail in voting and early voting but election day schedule conflicts occur in large part because of a federal law from eighteen forty five, which designated a week day, specifically the first Tuesday after the
first Monday of November, as election day. But an organization called why Tuesday has advocated a solution that's already being used successfully in Belgium, France, Germany, India and other countries. The group wants to change voting law and hold elections at a time that's better suited for modern day Americans. Ideally, they'd like to see election day held on a weekend, though making it a federal holiday during the week would
be a fallback option. Why Tuesday co founder Norman j Ornstein, a political scientist an author whose resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, says that the current election day is an outmoded holdover from an age in which the country was very different from today. He explained the law was written to take into account the needs of a primarily agrarian society. There wasn't any uber or trains or cars.
Farmers had to get their products to market in wagons, which usually required a day of travel, and they needed to be home for the sabbath, so they needed to have a day that fell between those, and people settled their accounts in those days on the first day of
the month, so they couldn't vote then. Given those constraints, the first Tuesday that falls after the first Monday in November seemed like the best choice, but as Ornstein notes, the timing is not so convenient in a modern, industrialized, technologically advanced society where many people work during the day from Monday through Friday, say nine am to five pm or thereabouts. And we of a system in which we have to vote near where we live, which isn't necessarily
near where we work, Ornstein said. And that means that if you're going to vote on election day, you have to go to the polls first thing in the morning before you go to work, or else rush over there late at night and hope that you can get there in time. Either way, if you run into a two hour line, you might not be able to vote. Though side note, if you do go late on election day, stay in line, the polls cannot close without allowing you
to exercise your right. If it were up to Ornstein, he would switch election day to a weekend, more specifically, a twenty four hour period from noon on Saturday to noon on Sunday. He said that way we wouldn't run into a problem for people who keep the Sabbath. Additionally, Ornstein would hold three days of early voting on Wednesday through Friday of the week before the Saturday Sunday election.
That would accommodate people who work on weekends, as well as more of those who have out of town travel scheduled. Forty eight states have adopted a version of this concept, with money having two or three weeks of early voting. But that's not all. To make voting even easier, Ornstein would use communications advances to set up remote voting stations where any citizen could vote during the designated times, no matter where they live in a given city or state.
As an alternative to weekend voting, Ornstein would favor the solution of making election Day a federal holiday, but he thinks that that wouldn't work quite so well. He said, setting up a new holiday is always an expensive proposition for the economy, and if you piggyback it on Veterans Day,
veterans are going to feel understandably short changed. So what's preventing us from change and some argue that it's a subtle way of suppressing votes from people more likely to have difficulty voting, people who are younger or older, or less financially advantaged. But Ornstein suggests that we've stayed with Tuesday more out of inertia than resistance. He said, we have a political system that doesn't do anything easily in these day as it has become so dysfunctional that it
doesn't even do critically important things that well. For the past several sessions of Congress, Steve Israel, a Democratic representative from New York, has introduced legislation to move election day to a weekend. His proposals have never made it out of committee. Today's episode was written by Patrick J. Kaiger and produced by Tyler Clang. For born this months of other curious topics, visit how stuff works dot com. Brain
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