Voting on Saturday

I wonder how many people know why we hold our national elections on the first Tuesday in November. I’ll tell you a little later, but I want you to try to guess what the reason was way back when the United States of America was formed.

We have over 300 million citizens in this country, and around 75 percent of them are eligible to vote. However, in the last presidential election, as important as it was, only about 125 million, slightly over half of those eligible, voted. That is a disgrace!

I have tried in the past to convince our federal government to allow Internet voting, but it has fallen on deaf ears. One thing many states have done, including my current one, Georgia, is to allow early voting. This is a great help, since it alleviates crowding at the polling places. Even so, I had to wait in a pretty long line when I voted early in the last presidential election in 2008. I can’t imagine what it would have been like had early voting not been allowed.

My original idea on online voting was probably thought to be insecure from tampering, although I thought it would be easy enough to use Social Security number and a secure password to log in. I have voted my proxy votes for my stock holdings for years in a similar manner, and it works very nicely.

There have been numerous disputed ballots from overseas, especially those absentee ballots from our troops stationed in remote areas of the world. I truly believe that the disallowed ballots changed the results of several elections, and cost at least one United States Senator his seat.

Online voting would have validated those late ballots and those without postmarks on them. I certainly hope that we do have the opportunity to vote online someday.

Okay, that is enough time to keep you guessing. I must confess that the reason I know the answer to my original question above is that it was the answer to a Jeopardy question.

The reason election day is the first Tuesday in November is to allow rural folk to finish the harvest and to get to and from the polling place without having to travel on a Sunday. How antiquated is that?

Don’t you agree with me that we could get a lot more people to vote if we changed the day for election to a Saturday. After all, polls are open from 7 AM until 7 PM, and most working people work between 8 AM and 5 PM. That makes it improbable or impossible for a working stiff to get to the polling place and vote for about 10 of those 12 hours.

Anyone who starts work at 8 or 9 AM would be hard pressed to vote before going to work. Lines at the polling places are always long between 5 and 7 PM. After a hard day at work, would you forego or delay your dinner to go stand in a long line to vote?

It’s no wonder our voting percentage is so low. Saturday voting would possibly boost the numbers closer to 200 million.