I think that this is a great public forum topic: it relates to a current event that will educate students on some of the nuanc
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Lesson 4.2 Day 3
| 13NFL1-Compulsory Voting Page 119 of 163 www.victorybriefs.com ALTERNATIVES INSTEAD OF COMPULSORY VOTING, WE SHOULD CREATE A HOLIDAY TO ALLOW PEOPLE TO VOTE. Martin P. Wattenberg 98, political scientist at the University of California, Irvine, "Should Election Day Be a Holiday" The Atlantic Monthly, 1998. A simple but effective change, however, could be made in election timing. An ordinary act of Congress could move Election Day to a Saturday or make it a holiday, thereby giving more people more time to vote. An 1872 law established the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November as Election Day. At that point in history it made little difference whether elections were on Saturday or Tuesday, because most people worked on Saturday. Only Sunday would have been a day free of work, but with elections in the late nineteenth century being occasions for drinking and gambling, that option was out of the question in such a religious country. Americans have become quite accustomed to Tuesday elections, just as they have to the nonmetric system for weights and measures and other artifacts of another time. State after state has set primary- election dates on Tuesdays -- all twentieth-century decisions, some of them quite recent. It would be difficult to change this custom. Furthermore, there would probably be some resistance from religious minorities that observe the sabbath on Saturday. An alternative would be to declare Election Day a national holiday. This would probably be resisted on the basis of cost. A solution would be to move Election Day to the second Tuesday of November and combine it with Veterans' Day, traditionally celebrated on November 11. This would send a strong signal about the importance our country attaches to voting. And what better way could there be to honor those who fought for democratic rights than for Americans to vote on what could become known as Veterans' Democracy Day Download 2 Mb. Share with your friends:
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