OPINION & EDITORIAL
Voting day switch misses needed fix
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Also by Robert Phansalkar:
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- Modern society troublesome for 'Christian nation' (November 30, 2007)
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by Robert Phansalkar
Tuesday, February 19, 2008
On this election day in Wisconsin, Sen. Herb Kohl, D-Wis., has an answer for those who claim working people are disenfranchised come election day: I’m on it.
Mr. Kohl has introduced a new plan, appropriately dubbed the “Weekend Voting Act,” to change the voting day from Tuesdays to weekends in an attempt to increase turnout from Americans in the contiguous 48 states come election time.
According to Mr. Kohl, the plan keeps polls open from 10 a.m. on Saturdays to 6 p.m. on Sundays to allow as much time as possible for voters to come to the polls. This Weekend Voting Act draws from Mr. Kohl’s previously co-sponsored Help America Vote Act, which aimed to improve elections in the wake of the presidential debacle in Florida in 2000 — only this time around, the word “improvement” is being used a bit too liberally.
While his weekend plans may ring true with millions of working Americans, it forgets one American cliche truer today than the day it was born: If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
Although Mr. Kohl’s idea sounds sexy, in that really non-sexy political way, it flies in the face of rationale established long before 2008: voting on Tuesday, as his press release acknowledges, was rooted in maximizing turnout, not depressing it.
While people are at work and out-and-about on Tuesdays, they are often doing the opposite come the weekend. Weekends are times for relaxation, not for civics, which is one of the largest logical flaws in Mr. Kohl’s plan. But sloth is only one bar for turning out the vote on weekends; factoring in Sabbaths, weekend getaways and general voter apathy reveals a picture far less civically engaged than the one Mr. Kohl envisions.
However, the Kohl camp will cite statistics claiming that over 60 percent of Americans are working now, guaranteeing fewer have an option to vote during the weekdays. This is meant to show there has been an increase in working couples and individuals across all demographics, namely women[CM1], meaning that polls are unavailable to those contributing to our economy.
However, simply because more people work in the modern world we live in does not justify changing the date — especially when it has worked well in the past and even this year.
In fact, Alabama, a Super Tuesday state, had a higher overall turnout rate than South Carolina, a weekend primary state. Don’t try chalking this up to the primaries being different — both states are of similar cultural makeup, occurred within a few weeks of each other and had open primaries.
So if things have always been like this, and it seems to have worked reasonably well since, why change things so drastically now?
Mr. Kohl believes changing the amount of time the polls are open is the correct method for increasing what is decidedly low turnout anyway, and while he most certainly is correct in this assumption, we don’t need to change the day elections are held to accomplish this goal.
Extending Election Day poll hours later in the evening would afford those working and politically active citizens the ability to get to the polls without waking up before the sun rises. Those who work from nine to five would not need to wake up absurdly early to make it to the polling booth on time, they wouldn’t need to cut out of work early to beat the lines in their home precinct and they certainly wouldn’t have to sacrifice their well-earned weekends to come in and voice their opinion.
However, for this to happen a change must occur first. And, as Mr. Kohl charges, “if we are to grant all Americans an equal opportunity to participate in the electoral process, and to elect our representatives in the great democracy, then we must be willing to reexamine all aspects of voting in America.”
Touche, Mr. Kohl, but reexamination hardly amounts to the overhaul you’re suggesting.
Robert Phansalkar (rphansalkar@badgerherald.com) is a first-year law student.
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