Election day should be considered a national holiday in the United States. Many people seem to believe that this should be true, which includes me. There are a multitude of reasons why we should make Election Day a holiday, including some facts like raising voter count, or even putting less stress on the voters. If Election Day were made a national holiday, students and parents would have the day off work and school, which gives them an opportunity to come in and vote. It also increases the chance of voting being fraudulent, as if everyone is voting at the same time, nobody is going to notice a person voting twice. Both major political parties in the United States right now are attacking each other over votes. This is really bad due to the fact that we need a strong leader who can help the country develop and grow. Many people believe that voting won’t make a difference alone, and they are right for the most part. Alone, not many people can make a change. However, voting is special because everyone can be important and helpful. Even one vote can matter in the millions due to the fact of how close some elections can be. This is one of the reasons why I think making Election Day a holiday would make votes more accurate. Bringing up one of the problems I had stated earlier, voting fraud would be a large issue in this system. However, we could fix that by also including a sign-in sheet with names and IDs. You would not have to put any voting information in public, so it wouldn’t interfere with any privacy issues. Another one of the problems with voting today is that it takes up time waiting in lines. If we change Election Day to a holiday, the government would possibly pay to increase the technology and security, making the lines a lot faster and safer. A good thing about this is that kids like me would have the day off school. This means that parents would not have to worry about driving their kids to school and instead focus on what they need to do like grocery shopping, and when they finish, they can vote. In 1845, President John Tyler signed a law making it so Election Day would be on the same specific day, which means if we wanted to make Election Day a national holiday, it would be simple. However, making it a holiday would be unfair to blue-collar and low-income workers. Oftentimes low-paid workers either don’t get time off or can’t afford to take the day off. Another bad thing about making Election Day a holiday would be how inefficient it would be to increase voter turnout on its own. In order to get a lot of voters, you would have to streamline the process with new tech and also increase advertising for the candidates. Even though there are consequences to making Election Day a holiday, there could also be major benefits too! The weekday off of work and school, along with the celebration of democracy from voting, would increase parties and people having fun through the day. According to Britannica, in Brazil on Election Day, they have huge parties and colorful parades throughout the cities. This reinforces the idea that voting should be a celebration, and not a chore. Another benefit could be that on the weekday, you could vote without any religious restrictions, however, some religions could prevent their believers from engaging in voting on a weekend. These changes could improve our voting participation by up to 30%. This is a large number when you realize that there are above 300 million people in the US alone. Many workplaces give their employees the day off right now anyway without the need for the government to mandate the holiday. This means that adding it as a holiday would possibly not change much. In countries like India and Singapore, voting participation is at around 93%, due to the fact that they have voting stations every 2 kilometers. This encourages people to vote without the walk being too far as to discourage them from voting. A major issue with voting in the United States is that it is pretty much completely electronic. The problem with this is that the government could watch or track our votes when they are supposed to be anonymous. This also means that they could find patterns, which could help predict voter counts for future elections. Obviously, elections hold massive power in the US, as we are basically picking our leader for the next 4 years. If we have a bad president, the only way to remove them is by impeaching, which we can’t do unless they used their power illegally. A national holiday is a big deal, as when you think about them, you imagine Veteran’s Day, or even the Texan Independence Day. Both of these days signify a very important time, as many veterans gave their lives for the United States, and Texas’s independence. Federal holidays are hard to get approved because the requirements to become one are quite fuzzy. Nobody really knows how to get one approved, however, no matter what, they would have to ask Congress. In order for Election Day to be approved to be a holiday, there would need to be a large effort to spread the word and get people to sign petitions or donate. If many people genuinely wanted to change Election Day to a holiday, it would happen very quickly due to how simple it would be. An issue with this is that it doesn’t really help anyone, besides the day off for federal workers and students. When you look at the voting statistics for the 2020 election, you can see that over 30 million registered voters did not vote. I believe that this may have impacted the election, as Trump and Biden were really close, and a few million votes would have obviously changed the outcome. Voting is weird, as it involves normal votes and electoral votes. With normal votes, all US citizens over the age of 18 can vote. However, with the electoral votes, it is different. An electoral vote is something that Congress does, each state gets a set number of votes equal to the number of Senators and Representatives. To win with electoral votes, you would need at least 270 of them.
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