The magazine of the North Carolina Center for Voter Education • Saturday May 19, 2012

It's Time for 'Election Week'

By Damon Circosta
Published: Sep. 7, 2011

RALEIGH - It’s a scene that is rooted in tradition. It is a weekday in the middle of autumn. Churches, community centers and libraries that are normally tranquil are, on this day, bustling with activity. Temporary signs on wooden stakes with phrases like “vote here” and “Smith for Judge” are everywhere. It’s Election Day, and the scene really hasn’t changed much in the last 100 years.

In the early days of the republic most of the citizenry were farmers. Thus they choose fall as the season of civic business as it is a relatively uneventful time of year for those who tend crops. For Election Day, they chose a Tuesday so that people with limited technology and often-impassible roads would only have to travel one day out of the year to conduct elections. Doing it any other way seemed inconceivable.

For nostalgia’s sake, it might make sense for Election Day to be on a single Tuesday in the fall. But by almost any other measure, the “citizen-farmer” model of collecting and counting votes is as outdated as the horse-drawn plow.

We live in a country that prides itself on innovation. From our very beginning, Americans have been obsessed with building the next best thing. In many ways our election system has benefited from this type of thinking. Although the majority of voters still cast ballots on Election Day, we have opened up the process to include early voting and absentee voting by mail. We have devised better ways to track voter registration and count ballots.

The process of conducting elections has certainly improved, but in recent years our innovation trend has leveled off. We seem to be having more discussions about how to shape the elections process for the benefit of one political party or another, and fewer discussions about how to improve our election system for everyone.

In an era where just about everyone is too busy, over-scheduled and frantically running from errand to errand it might make sense to move away from the decades-old concept of an Election Day. Perhaps we should have an “Election Week.” Some say we already have such a system with early voting locations and absentee ballots, but the key difference here is that on Election Day we have sufficient precincts in every neighborhood.  Election Week would extend our current early voting by keeping all precincts open for a week, not just a few early voting centers like we have now.

We could also explore alternative ways to submit a ballot, including online voting. Of course, we would have to take the proper precautions to ensure such an election system is secure. But in a country where millions of people trust the Internet to shop, bank and even find a soulmate, surely we can devise a secure Internet voting system.

For those of us who prefer the concept of keeping an Election Day, the least we could do is make it a state and federal holiday. Regardless of your affinity for the concepts of Election Week or online voting, reopening discussions on how to improve the voting process is something that everyone should be in favor of, regardless of party affiliation. Given our abysmally low voter turnout, our very democracy is at stake.

Our founders chose to conduct elections on a Tuesday in the autumn for reasons of practicality. These were not men who rested on tradition. Keeping such an impractical and antiquated concept alive simply because “that’s the way it’s always been” is contrary to the spirit of what our American democracy is all about.