
Why I’m giving my company Election Day off - _nh_
https://techcrunch.com/2016/09/10/why-im-giving-my-company-election-day-off/
======
kyriakos
I think elections should be held on weekends giving the maximum number of
voters the opportunity to vote. This is the case in most countries anyway.

~~~
SNvD7vEJ
Sweden here:

We always have the election on a Sunday to maximize number of voters.

Also, voting can of course be posted ahead, and voting can be delegated to an
ombudsman if you are unable to attend physically at a voting station.

We don't allow voting through any electronic devices, nor voting over the
internet.

All votes are placed using anonymous envelopes. This way no one can trace who
you vote for, while still securing that only one vote are placed per person
(by authentication at entry at voting station, and manually checked of in a
list). All vote counting is manual.

And we don't have a requirement for registration for voters. Voters are
registered automatically, based on if you are allowed to vote (citizenship
etc) or not.

I would not call a country a democracy if they don't make it easy for everyone
to participate in the election. Having the voting take place when most people
are working, or require them to register ahead for voting is not how a
democracy works.

~~~
ddeck
_> I would not call a country a democracy if they don't make it easy for
everyone to participate in the election_

Agreed. I'd go one step further and advocate compulsory voting (at least
compulsory turning up). Even for the most civic minded, it's not difficult to
end up with unexpected other obligations on the day and defaulting to a "oh
well, one vote wont make a difference" mindset.

Compulsory voting also forces all employers to accommodate their employees
going to vote.

Growing up in Australia, I didn't realize for some time that Australia was
somewhat of an anomaly in the developed world in this regard.

I'm curious if anyone has seen any research on what the impact of compulsory
voting would likely be in the US with respect to the major parties.

~~~
TelmoMenezes
Assuming that it is illegal to prevent someone from voting, what problem is
this compulsory voting meant to solve?

It feels like totalitarianism to me. What if I feel that a certain election is
a sham, and prefer not to participate? Democratic regimes should be sane
enough so that people want to vote. Too many people not wanting to vote should
be taken as a signal that something is seriously wrong.

~~~
UlyssesSKrunk
>Assuming that it is illegal to prevent someone from voting, what problem is
this compulsory voting meant to solve?

Apathy and laziness. Plus in the us there have been quite a few states which
try to pass laws for the sole purpose of making it more difficult for certain
groups, usually minorities, to vote. Making voting voting compulsory would do
a lot to solve that.

>It feels like totalitarianism to me.

I'm sorry, but that's just stupid. If anything it's forced democracy and not
even remotely close to totalitarianism. There are tons of things citizens are
forced to do, file taxes, sign up for selective service, serve on a jury which
costs jurors money if they are chosen, etc. Forcing people to go to a voting
place once every 4 years is pretty light comparatively.

>What if I feel that a certain election is a sham, and prefer not to
participate?

What I've heard from Australians is that a common thing there is spoiling your
ballet if you don't want to vote.

>Too many people not wanting to vote should be taken as a signal that
something is seriously wrong.

That I heartily agree with. I personally don't vote because I live in Illinois
so my vote means nothing. That's a serious problem caused by a horribly
inefficient and outdated system. Right now a vast majority of Americans have
no power in elections, it always comes down to a very small number of swing
states, usually less than 15. Live in 70% of the states? Well tough shit, what
you want doesn't matter at all. That imo is the fundamental problem. I think
if we switch from possibly the worst voting method to just a straight
democratic vote, ignoring all the superior voting methods just sticking with
FPTP, we would see much greater turnout.

~~~
killbrad
"I personally don't vote because I live in Illinois so my vote means nothing."

So you only vote in presidential election years, and only fill out the ballot
for the presidential candidate? I think you might be doing it wrong.

------
markpapadakis
In Greece, elections are always held on Sundays.

No provision for submitting votes by any other means other than physically
going to election posts(in practice, the government uses schools), entering a
tiny makeshift voting booth (which in theory protects you from prying eyes and
gives you privacy, but it really doesn't), selecting one paper sheet among the
pack you received before entering the booth (one sheer for each political
party), placing it in an envelope, sealing it, exiting the booth and dropping
it into a box. It doesn't get more analogue than that. Also, there are
penalties for those who do not vote - in theory you will be prosecuted, in
practice, AFAIK, it rarely happens, but either way, it adds to the
ridiculousness of the whole thing (of course the parties want you to vote, and
they conspired to force you to vote by making it illegal not to.. This is
Greece).

~~~
matt_wulfeck
According to this [1] article the abstention rate is near 44% for Greek votes.
It seems making it easier doesn't not necessarily make it more inclusive.

Here in the states I always vote absentee. I get my ballot, fill it out, and
drop it in the mailbox. I'm not sure how they can make this process easier
without it being online or making the postage free.

[1] [http://greece.greekreporter.com/2015/09/21/voter-turnout-
in-...](http://greece.greekreporter.com/2015/09/21/voter-turnout-in-greek-
elections-drops-to-new-historic-low-infographic/)

~~~
blacksmith_tb
Here in Oregon it can be free, as there are ballot dropboxes at public
libraries, along with election commission offices if you don't want pay for a
stamp.

------
coldtea
The real question is why isn't Election Day a mandatory public holiday, for
both state and private employees. Even if it was on a Sunday, employees should
be required to give 3-5 hours off of work for people working that day.

Perhaps this democracy thing is not considered that important, except for lip
service.

~~~
sb057
>employees should be required to give 3-5 hours off of work for people working
that day

Time off from work to go vote is already legally mandated.

~~~
coldtea
It should be automatic and without need to ask for it for all employees (is
it?), so you don't the have the phenomenon were you're considered a "bad
employee" for going to vote.

A mandated downtime during which businesses wont be open (which some special
shifts for businesses that can't close, like hospitals etc) would fix that.

------
dbg31415
Cute, but I think there's a bigger issue than just people not voting. Local
races, and local issues they can have a dramatic impact, get very little news
coverage. So even if you vote, you don't really know what you're voting for.
Many ballot initiatives are intentionally confusing to take advantage of this.
This is dangerous.

Perfect example, in Texas the Energy Commission is known as the Railroad
Commission. These people have tremendous power over oil production and thus
our economy... But if you are the average voter who only knows about parties
and the presidency, you probably are just voting blind, or you say to
yourself, "I really don't care who runs the railroad... didn't even know we
still had a railroad... how quaint."

Another great example, the wording on the ballot initiative that banned Uber
and Lyft from Austin -- in the exit polls many people thought they were voting
to keep Uber and Lyft but in fact voted the opposite of their intent.

We need to do more to ensure that people are aware of the down ballot issues
and races -- voting doesn't mean much if people aren't informed and are just
selecting candidates based on who's name looks better on the page.

EDIT: Cleaned up typos. Why did I try and write on my phone? Sorry!

* Explaining Exactly What a 'Yes' and 'No' Vote on Prop 1 Means | KUT || [http://kut.org/post/explaining-exactly-what-yes-and-no-vote-...](http://kut.org/post/explaining-exactly-what-yes-and-no-vote-prop-1-means)

* Ask the Candidates: Should the Railroad Commission Change Its Name? | StateImpact Texas || [https://stateimpact.npr.org/texas/2014/02/24/ask-the-candida...](https://stateimpact.npr.org/texas/2014/02/24/ask-the-candidates-should-the-railroad-commission-change-its-name/)

------
spc476
A nice gesture, but will the company also give the day off for local
elections? Where I live, we just had an election on August 30th for a few
_very local_ offices. Local elections have more of an affect on our lives than
national elections.

~~~
Stratoscope
This is so true, and I'm as guilty of it as anyone. Just look at the first
sentence of the article:

> This year’s U.S. presidential election is confusing for everyone.

Yeah. Presidential election. That's who you think about, right? Trump, or
Hillary, or maybe Gary Johnson if you're like me.

But it's so weird: they have all this other stuff on the ballot! Senators,
congresspeople, state assemblypersons, governors, county boards of
supervisors, even your mayor and city council members.

And if you're in California, there are probably fifty ballot propositions to
worry about too! Who has time to think about all that? It's so much easier to
just think about one contest: The Big One.

So yeah, I definitely appreciate your comment. Perhaps now I have shamed
myself into thinking about all the more local issues that really do have much
more effect on our daily lives.

Living in Menlo Park (CA), this is very real. I look at our neighbors Palo
Alto and Redwood City with all the development and activity there. Compare
either of those downtowns with downtown Menlo Park and see which ones are
hopping and which one ain't. The local joke is that we want to Keep Menlo
Dark. It's a nice quiet downtown, where nobody has to bear the burden of
running a successful restaurant or retail shop.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
I (from UK) didn't think you elected a president, I thought you elected people
who you think will vote for the president you want.

It's such a convoluted system; it seems so, uh, undemocratic(?).

~~~
Amezarak
Well, you don't elect the PM in parliamentary democracies either.

That said, the electoral college is _largely_ a formality. Much more important
than the fairly remote chance an elector might vote against the will of his
state is the fact that most states have winner-take-all systems, wherein you
get all of the state's electors by winning a majority. Even that has only
proved problematic thrice: once in 2000, once in 1888, and once in 1876. And I
think there are reasonable arguments in its defense: you force candidates to
have some geographical distribution of support, for example. If it was based
on solely on the popular vote, you could win the election with massive
majorities in a few populous states and no support elsewhere.

It's also balanced out, I think, by the fact the Presidency is, relatively
speaking, not all that powerful of an office in America anyway - his most
important power is "figurehead/scapegoat in a bully pulpit." Other than that
he gets a veto over legislation (which Congress can override), command of the
military (which is funded by Congress), and gets to appoint some top level
executive offices and the judiciary - subject to Senate approval.
Hypothetically Congress can also remove him from office via impeachment.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
>the fact the Presidency is, relatively speaking, not all that powerful of an
office [...] command of the military (which is funded by Congress), [...] //

So command of the most powerful military complex in the World. Who in your
opinion is powerful then? ;o)

~~~
Amezarak
Being commander-in-chief is very different from being a kind of dictator of
the military complex and is strictly circumscribed by law and custom.

For example, all commissioned officers are approved by the Senate, and the
Posse Comitatus Act prevents the President from using the military to enforce
domestic policy. Congress also has the sole authority of appropriating money
to the military and they can attach whatever strings they want.

There is probably not single individual more powerful than the President, but
Congress as a whole is by far the most powerful branch of government. The
Presidency doesn't even compare. That said, I think what we've seen over the
past several years, and will continue to see, is that dysfunctional Congresses
increase the power of the Presidency.

------
malloreon
Reminder that in America high voter turnout almost always favors Democrats,
and the Republicans are very good at gerrymandering and taking control of
state governments.

They use this power to restrict voting rather than make it easier, mainly in
the name of combating voter fraud, which statistically doesn't actually occur
in the first place.

~~~
paulddraper
I might be responding to a HN project that remixes Bernie tweets. But I'll
bite.

\---

> Reminder that in America high voter turnout almost always favors Democrats

Wrong; the effect is mixed. [http://www.factcheck.org/2016/06/sanders-shaky-
turnout-claim...](http://www.factcheck.org/2016/06/sanders-shaky-turnout-
claim/)

> Republicans are very good at gerrymandering and taking control of state
> governments

Both sides gerrymander as much as possible. But Democratic votes already
naturally clump geographically in a state, causing them to say, win 90% in an
urban district and loose 40% in a bunch of others.
[https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2014-09-08/why-
democ...](https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2014-09-08/why-democrats-
can-t-blame-gerrymandering)

Most analyses just look at total votes and resultant state representation,
while forgetting that most of the effect is a natural consequence of
Democratic geopolitics, rather than some Republican superiority in
gerrymandering acumen.

> They [Republicans] use this power to restrict voting rather than make it
> easier

Maybe the media favors that story in the past 12 months, but that is _not_ a
trend.

The Voting Rights Act had better support by Republicans than by Democrats. In
fact, the Democratic majority had fillibustered the bill in the Senate until
the Republican minority leader stepped in.

Remember the voting rights case where a federal court concluded there was "a
systematic and deliberate attempt to reduce black political opportunity. Such
an attempt is plainly unconstitutional. It replaces a system in which blacks
could and did succeed, with one in which they almost certainly cannot...The
inference of racial motivation is inescapable."

Whom did that case convict? The original President Clinton.

[https://www.justice.gov/sites/default/files/osg/briefs/1990/...](https://www.justice.gov/sites/default/files/osg/briefs/1990/01/01/sg900402.txt)

Both sides play these dumb games.

> voter fraud, which statistically doesn't actually occur in the first place.

Probably. While it's often repeated that there are very few "credible" cases
of voter fraud, that doesn't necessarily say much.

Remember that George Bush won the presidency in 2000 by 0.009% of the Florida
vote. The Democrats were sure counting the beans then.

~~~
philwelch
> The Voting Rights Act had better support by Republicans than by Democrats.
> In fact, the Democratic majority had fillibustered the bill in the Senate
> until the Republican minority leader stepped in.

The Voting Rights Act was passed in 1965, which was before the Southern
Strategy. After the Southern Strategy, the Voting Rights Act's requirement for
majority-minority districts resulted in packing black voters into a fewer
number of districts, which is a form of gerrymandering that benefits
Republicans.

~~~
justinlardinois
Not to mention that this in the middle of party realignment; the Democratic
and Republican parties were in the middle of switching sides on the political
spectrum.

~~~
philwelch
That's an oversimplification. Democrats have always been the pro-labor party
and Republicans have always been the pro-business party, it's just that during
the Civil War, northern businesses were competing for economic and political
power with southern planters (and were thus anti-slavery), hence the
Republicans became the anti-slavery party. Resentments over the Civil War led
a majority of southern whites to the Democratic camp up until the 1960's, when
the Johnson administration went all-in on civil rights and the Republicans
deployed the Southern Strategy to sweep up the southern white vote.

~~~
justinlardinois
And the relevant effect here is that the parties essentially switched sides on
social issues.

------
unimpressive
I recently had occasion to compile a table of general election turnout for
different countries, the results may surprise you:

Austrailia 91%

Brazil 78.90%

Britain 66.4%

Canada 68.3%

Finland 70.1%

France 79.48%

Germany 71.5%

India 66.3%

Israel 72%

New Zealand 77.90%

Russia 65.25%

United States 54.9%

~~~
davegardner
I think the main reason why Australia has such a high voter turnout is because
it's extremely easy to vote. It is compulsory in Australia, but the fine is
only $20 (~US$15). Voting always takes place on a Saturday. There are polling
booths all over the place, and you can lodge your vote at any booth anywhere
in the country. If you know you won't be able to make it on the day then it's
quite easy to find a pre-polling station or lodge a postal vote in the few
weeks prior to the election.

~~~
edcastro
Brazil also have compulsory votes with fines. Fines are low but are a pain in
the ass to pay. Also if you don't vote you cannot get some documents
(passports, etc) and you can't take any job in the government. Voting booths
are abundant and it's always holidays tho. If for some reason you can't vote
you have to justify to the "voting justice"-related thingy. Usually not a big
deal.

------
danblick
Many states require employers to give time off to vote:

[http://www.findlaw.com/voting-rights-law.html](http://www.findlaw.com/voting-
rights-law.html)

------
sausman
I wish I could vote every day and have it count. Thankfully this is the case
for many goods and services that are provided on the market. If I don't like
the product I am getting or where my money is going I simply take my business
elsewhere. Providers of goods and services that face market competition are
encouraged on a continuous basis to be responsive to consumers or they risk
going out of business.

By comparison, voting in elections feels ineffective. Monopolies, even those
run by politicians elected every X years, are notoriously bad at serving the
needs of consumers. Even if we could vote every day from our phones on who is
in charge of a given monopoly, I still don't think it would change much.

------
matt_wulfeck
With all of the data available around the word (some having it on a weekend,
some a holiday) I can't see making a change like this having an appreciable
impact on voter turnout.

Besides, say what you want about the US electorate system, but it has not
changed much. There are fundemantal problems related to voter turnout, and
superficial changes like this really are pointless in the scheme of things.

------
jrnichols
I've found it easier to either get an absentee ballot or vote by mail, and in
a lot of places around here you can do early voting. haven't gone to a poll
_on_ election day in a long time.

------
NetStrikeForce
In Spain we also hold elections on Sunday, but the problem comes when they
happen to be in summer on a really nice sunny day. Some people can't be arsed
and probably for good reason.

------
sctb
Related discussion:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12291529](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12291529)

------
KON_Air
All things aside who are the candidates? The joke that Hillary and Trump are
seriously being candidates got old fast.

------
vacri
> _Interestingly, Morocco was the first country to publicly recognize the
> United States as an official state with the ratification of the Moroccan-
> American Treaty of Friendship in 1786. Signed by Thomas Jefferson and John
> Adams, it recognized Moroccan ports as open to U.S. ships and is the
> longest-standing unbroken treaty relationship in U.S. history._

Within a decade of recognising the US, Morocco was pirating their ships again,
and the US had to pay huge sums to the Barbary corsairs for safe passage -
leading to the creation of the US Navy and the First and Second Barbary Wars
in 1801 and 1815. Maybe the treaty was never torn up and discarded, but it was
broken pretty quickly.

~~~
rmason
The Barbary wars were fought against pirates whose home ports were in Libya,
Tunisia and Algeria. Morocco actually gave some protection to American ships.
Far as I know Morocco has always been America's friend.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbary_Wars](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbary_Wars)

~~~
thaumasiotes
Wikipedia lists Morocco as a belligerent in the first Barbary War; as I point
out in my sibling comment, for Morocco to war against the United States does
not violate the treaty.

