Sunday, November 24

Why the US elections are on Tuesdays

In Latin America and in much of the world, elections They are celebrated on Sunday, a non-working day, but this is not the case in the United States.

This is the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November and like every four years, the United States holds its presidential elections which, in this case, face Kamala Harris and Donald Trump.

But why precisely that Tuesday and not another day?

The answer comes from the 19th century and has to do with horse carriages and also with religion.

Getty Image: Voting in the US for president and vice president occurs on the first Tuesday in November.

From the countryside to the city

The rule that establishes the date of elections in the United States was set in 1845 to fill a legal void that existed on this matter.

So, when Congress began to look for an appropriate date for this, it had to take several elements into account.

You could not vote on a Sunday because that was the day that most citizens used to go to church.

It also couldn’t be on Mondays since voters would have to travel by carriage on Sunday from their homes to the voting centers (in the county capitals), something that many would not do because it was the “Lord’s Day.”

Getty Images: In the 19th century, American society was largely rural.

Wednesdays were usually the day of the agricultural markets, when producers offered the fruits of their harvests for sale to the rest of the citizens.

Thus, Tuesday remained a good option.

“The reason for that decision is that American society was rural. In the 19th century, most voters lived on farms. It was justified then, but not now, in the internet age,” says Steve Israel, who was a member of the US House of Representatives for the Democratic Party between 2011 and 2017.

During his time in Congress, Israel several times introduced a bill to establish that elections would take place on a weekend in order to encourage turnout at the polls.

“Sadly, the United States is behind other democratic countries in participation,” he noted in an interview with BBC Mundo in 2018.

Getty Images: As a member of Congress, Steve Israel unsuccessfully tried to change voting day in the US by law.

“The reason for that is that many voters say that Tuesday is a very inconvenient day to go to vote because they have work and if we moved voting to the weekend, we would see an increase in citizen participation. Unfortunately, the law went nowhere,” he said.

Theirs has not been the only initiative in this regard. In fact, there is an NGO called “Why Tuesday?” (Why Tuesday?) which is also dedicated to promoting the change of voting day to the weekend.

Electoral pandemic

According to a 2017 study by the Pew Research Center, the inconvenience of going to vote due to work schedules was the main cause of abstention in elections up to that point.

So much so that the African-American comedian Chris Rock ventured to give an answer to the question of why Americans voted on a Tuesday:

“They don’t want you to vote. If they wanted, we wouldn’t hold the elections on a Tuesday. In November. Have you ever had a party on a Tuesday? No. Because no one would come,” he said in a presentation at Madison Square Garden in 2008.

Before 2020 and the pandemic, this trend somewhat favored the Republican party.

“It is easier for people with more time and resources to vote on Tuesday. The greatest inequality when it comes to voting is not between political parties but among the population interested in politics,” Daniel R. Birdsong, professor of Political Science at the University of Dayton, explains to BBC Mundo.

Although Rock’s joke made a lot of sense before 2020, where about 25% of the electorate indicated that they did not vote because they could not take time off from work to go to a voting center, things changed with the covid pandemic. -19.

As a consequence of mobility restrictions, different measures were implemented to facilitate voting, especially with the boost given to voting by mail or early voting days in some states.

In fact, since 2020, 62 laws have been passed in nearly 25 US states that helped facilitate citizen electoral participation.

Getty Images: In recent years, measures have been implemented that have made it easier to participate in presidential elections.

And in ten of those states – including Hawaii, California, Illinois, Maryland, New Mexico, Nevada and Vermont – laws were passed that created more places to cast votes by mail or voting centers.

Among other reasons, these measures led to the 2020 elections and the 2022 legislative elections being the ones with the highest participation in decades.

For Birdsong, these measures also meant that turnout on election day stopped entirely favoring one party or the other.

“Republican campaigns have been slow in this regard and in 2020 the right discouraged early or mail-in voting,” he adds..

In fact, during that campaign Donald Trump harshly attacked the mail-in voting method, saying that it was fraudulent and, after his electoral defeat, he held it responsible – without providing evidence – for the adverse results he obtained.

Looking ahead to the 2024 votes, Republicans have changed their strategy and encouraged voting by mail.

Lara Trump, daughter-in-law of the former president and current head of the Republican Party, justified the change: “In this electoral cycle, the Republicans will beat the Democrats at their own game, taking advantage of all the legal tactics at our disposal based on the rules of each state. ”.

In any case, for experts, the problem does not lie in whether to vote on Tuesday or during a weekend, but in another more important aspect: the restrictions that some states are placing on people to vote.

According to the Brennan Center for Justice, since the pandemic, 19 US states have passed laws that restrict the right to vote or limit access to the polls.

Getty Images: Since 2020, several states have passed laws that restrict the right to vote in the US.

Among them is Texas, which imposed the requirement to provide the social security number or driver’s license to be able to vote by mail, which means that people who do not have these documents, such as the youngest, cannot can access the vote.

“I think it’s not about the day. If you ask me if Tuesday should be changed to a weekend day, my answer is no. Because the day matters little if there are also dozens of restrictions that limit access to voting,” explains academic Birdsong.

“What needs to be expanded is this system of early voting and voting by mail that really facilitates access for citizens and in that way we can talk about a participatory democracy.”

Getty Images:

click here to read more stories from BBC News World.

Subscribe here to our new newsletter to receive a selection of our best content of the week every Friday.

You can also follow us on YouTube, instagram, TikTok, x, Facebook and in our whatsapp channel.

And remember that you can receive notifications in our app. Download the latest version and activate them.

  • What the polls say about the US elections and what Harris and Trump have to do to win
  • “Dear, dear friend of mine”: the special relationship between Barack Obama and Kamala Harris (and how they have helped boost their political careers)