Sarkozy
If we held our elections on a Sunday or declared election day a holiday (on par with July 4th or Thanksgiving where nearly everyone has off work), we might get 85% of registered voters to turn out.
Or maybe if we had a little less gerrymandering, some competitive elections, and a few decent candidates to vote for.
Just a thought.
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to be continued...
posted by Sarah PB & J @ 4:14 PM
2 Comments:
I think the best way to increase turnout is to allow for internet voting. I'm always living in a different place than I'm registered, as are tons of young people, and getting an absentee ballot is both burdensome and useless - they're only rarely counted and only in really close elections. I know Vallelly disagrees based on his pie in the sky theory that it's good for people to interact in the public square, but we're busy people, c'mon.
My other idea has been to have a 24 hour voting period. You could vote on the east coast from 9am-9am and on the west coast from 6am-6am. This would alleviate the east coast reporting before the west coast polls have closed problem, and allow for people who work odd hours etc. to get to the polls. The only issue would be getting people to man the polling places for a full 24 hours (and getting polling places to agree to be open in the wee hours of the night). But there's got to be at least a handful of really dedicated people in each polling district who would sit at a random church at 4am, right?
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