Election day should be a national holiday: Teitel

People can’t exercise their democratic right to vote if they don’t have time to do it.

TheStar.com
Oct. 4, 2016
By Emma Teitel

When I was in high school, running for student council, it was pretty easy to “get out the vote” on election day. All you had to do was plug in the school’s popcorn machine beside the ballot boxes and wait for the smell of hot imitation butter to reel your constituency in to the polls. A word of advice to any politician trying to increase youth voter turnout:  the key to your success is not in lofty promises of progressive change. It’s in free food. And equally important: easy access to that food.

Of course I am being facetious, but there is a kernel of truth (sorry) in the popcorn anecdote. People, no matter their political affiliation, are more likely to vote when voting is made easy.

This is why nearly 300 tech employers in the United States announced this month that they will allow their staff to take off a full day’s work on November 8, as a paid company holiday, to vote in the U.S. election.

Some of the tech firms who have agreed to make this accommodation include Spotify, About.com, the Wikimedia Foundation and the political data firm, ShareProgress.

Why are they doing this?

The founder of ShareProgress, Jim Pugh, told the Washington Post that the participating companies’ hope the new policy raises voter turnout in the United States. “The more we can have this be a norm within the corporate space, the more it’s going to push good civic corporate behaviour,” Pugh told the Post.

I would take this idea one step further and argue that the more we implement this kind of policy everywhere - not merely in the United States or in the corporate world - but here in Canada, voter turnout will increase dramatically.

It’s true that the 2015 Canadian federal election saw the highest voter turnout in more than 20 years, but why shouldn’t we aim even higher next time around? In fact, to hell with employers, why not turn the federal election into a national civic holiday?

Critics of this idea often argue that a national voting holiday wouldn’t achieve much because apathy is the main reason people avoid the polls - not a lack of time. And they do have a point.

According to Statistics Canada data from 2011, the number one reason Canadians didn’t vote in the federal election that year was because they were “not interested” in doing so.

But guess what was listed as the second most common reason for avoiding the polls?

No time.

According to the same study, 22 per cent of Canadians who said they didn’t vote in the 2011 election abstained because they were “too busy.” That strikes me as a big number and a big problem.

But it’s not a big surprise.

It may be hard for some of the nation’s more politically informed and invested people to accept, but there are a lot of good citizens out there whose decision to avoid the polls has little to do with the strength of the candidates on the ballot and everything to do with strictly practical forces such as the weather and traffic.

If you are given a narrow window in which to cast your ballot during your work day, and you have a handful of tasks to complete before you pick your kids up from school in the afternoon, voting becomes a luxury. I am not making this up: I know several people whose decision to vote is based on nothing more than how busy they are the very day of the election. But they wouldn’t dare admit this out loud, for fear they’d be labelled stupid, apathetic and irresponsible.

But they aren’t stupid, apathetic and irresponsible. They’re just busy. And being busy is not a crime.

Sure, the self-righteous argument that they should know better because they live in the glorious and free utopia of Canada and “how dare they take their voting rights for granted” may hold some truth. But does this disapproving, shaming position do anything at all to increase voter turnout? No. It just makes people feel bad.

So let’s do something that makes people feel good. Let’s turn Election Day into a national civic holiday.

Just think about it: If you get the day off to vote, you can make an occasion out of it. You can go for lunch. You can see a movie. You can pick up your dry cleaning. And most importantly, you can take an extra few minutes or even an hour to think long and hard about who it is you’d like to vote for.

After all, what’s the use of observing Canada Day, a national holiday marking the moment our democracy came into being, if we don’t also grant our citizens ample time to participate in its continued existence?