Midterm election turnout is historically lower than presidential years, but preliminary returns indicate that Tuesday's vote saw the lowest participation rate since the 1940s.
“Election Day should be a national holiday so that everyone has the time and opportunity to vote,” Sanders said Friday in a statement. “While this would not be a cure-all, it would indicate a national commitment to create a more vibrant democracy.”
Sanders’s Vermont had its lowest voter turnout in recorded history, with 43.7 percent of registered voters participating.
Sanders plans to file a bill once Congress returns next week that would add Election Day to the list of federal holidays. Since many jobs take federal holidays off, the move could reduce the costs associated with voting and free up voters to make it to the polls.
“We should not be satisfied with a ‘democracy’ in which more than 60 percent of our people don't vote and some 80 percent of young people and low-income Americans fail to vote,” he said.
“We can and must do better than that.”
Actually Sanders is not alone in this idea, according to the article Hillary and John Kerry sponsored a bill to do the same thing back in 2005 when they were both still in the Senate.
I think it's a great idea and I would like to see other incentives to vote as well.
Perhaps providing a tax incentive might be a good start. Americans seem to love those.
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