Support an Election Day holiday

Here’s some­thing we can all sup­port. One of the bar­ri­ers to peo­ple vot­ing has always been the amount of time it takes to go, wait, vote, and come back to work. While your employer must give you three hours in which to do so, yes­ter­day there were peo­ple wait­ing upwards of five hours in lines across the coun­try. A national–Federal–holiday on Elec­tion Day would go a long way towards solv­ing this prob­lem, while increas­ing the voter turnout, and also increas­ing the num­ber of polling vol­un­teers needed to keep up.

Down­sides? Not many, unless you are part of the polit­i­cal machine that tries hard to tar­get spe­cific demo­graph­ics (e.g., Cuban-Americans liv­ing in Miami) and roots against mas­sive voter turnout (though the CW that turnout helps Democ­rats seems to have been turned on its head this year). Some peo­ple argue that a new Fed­eral Hol­i­day would hurt busi­ness, but the solu­tion would be to move another Fed­eral Hol­i­day to Elec­tion Day… say President’s Day (third Mon­day in Feb­ru­ary), or Veteran’s Day (Nov. 11).

As it turns out, there is a bill in the Sen­ate to do this. [S.726](http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/z?d108:SN00726:), spon­sored by Deb­bie Stabenow (D-MI) and cospon­sored by Richard Durbin (D-IL), John Kerry (D-MA), Mary Lan­drieu (D-LA), and Calr Levin (D-MI).

Please con­sider writ­ing to your Con­gres­sional del­e­ga­tion in sup­port of this bill, which appears to have stalled. (See rea­son above: polit­i­cal machine) You can find their addresses below.

See: [Full text of S.726](http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c108:S.726: “Really short, essen­tially asks for a Fed­eral hol­i­day on Elec­tion Day in even num­bered years”)
and: [How to write Let­ters to Congress](http://usgovinfo.about.com/library/weekly/aa020199.htm “For tips on get­ting your let­ter noticed”)
and: [This link to find and send e-mail to your Con­gress persons](http://www.mrsmith.com/index2.html “It’s called Mr. Smith eMails Wash­ing­ton… cute”)