Ever Wonder Why We Vote On Tuesdays?

One thing stands out in the recent vote in Scotland on whether to stay a part of the United Kingdom — more than 84 percent of eligible voters turned out to cast their ballot.
In the United States, the world’s first modern and “leading” democracy, the percentage isn’t so good. According to the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance, the U.S. ranked 91st out of 198 countries in voter turnout with 65.95 percent of voters going to the polls in 2012.
Compare that to counties like Bolivia, Ethiopia, Australia, Singapore, Malta, Luxembourg and, yes, Cuba. What do they have in common? First, each has turnout of more than 90 percent in elections since 2010. Second, voters pick candidates on a weekend day, not on Tuesdays, as occurs with federal and state elections in the United States.
“Other democracies are not so incompetent,” notes writer Juliet Lapidos in a 2008 story in Slate.com. She pointed to Sweden and Australia, both of which get 96 percent of people on registration rolls. Australia, which like the U.S. requires voters to fill out registration cards, also gets high participation because voting is compulsory (you get a $20 fine if you don’t vote, unless you have a really good excuse.)
So ever wonder why we vote on Tuesdays?
It’s because we were an agrarian society when Congress picked Tuesday as voting day in the early days of the country and later extended the voting day to all federal elections, according to the nonprofit, WhyTuesday.org.
“We traveled by horse and buggy,” explains the organization, powered by a well-connected, bipartisan group seeking change. “Farmers needed a day to get to the county seat, a day to vote, and a day to get back, without interfering with the three days of worship. So that left Tuesday and Wednesday, but Wednesday was market day.“
Today, however, our society isn’t a horse-and-buggy culture, as aptly displayed a few years back in a publicity stunt by former Gov. Mark Sanford when he led a horse and buggy around the Statehouse to draw attention to some of the state’s antiquated laws. (A year earlier, you might remember that he took two piglets to the Statehouse lobby to complain about pork-barrel spending, but the pigs’ bowels didn’t exactly cooperate with the photo op.)
So with all of the fiddling that seems to go on with political factions claiming they want to boost voter participation, why not look at just moving the date for the whole country from Tuesday to, say, a Saturday?
“I would support voting on a Saturday,” said state Rep. Jim Merrill, R-Daniel Island. “Other than a Saturday — or Sunday, which is off the table for me — I don’t think there would be much difference.”
Merrill agreed that moving voting day to Saturday would help because Tuesday voting “hinders turnout and I believe both parties will benefit from additional supporters of the respective parties being able to vote on a day that does not conflict with work.” He aptly pointed out, however, that moving fall voting to December might get around college football season, too.
Already there is some experimenting with weekend voting. This November in Georgia, there will be some Sunday voting in DeKalb County. In 2008 and 2012 in South Carolina, presidential preference primaries were on Saturdays, not Tuesdays.
Moving voting to Saturdays could reduce the need for other voting changes seen in other parts of the country but absent in South Carolina: true early voting without excuse restrictions, no-excuse absentee voting by mail or all-mail voting.
While we wouldn’t oppose mandatory voting in elections as is done in Australia, it probably wouldn’t ever fly here in the United States because of our libertarian tendencies.
“It is a right and a responsibility,” Merrill said of voting. “The very least someone can do to participate in our republic is to take a few moments out of their day, once every two years or so, to vote. People left their families, fought and died so we could have a participatory government.”
Andy Brack is editor and publisher of Statehouse Report. He can be reached at brack@statehousereport.com.