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Comment by coldtea | Hacker News Reader

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.

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There is a certain political party that is harmed by high voter turnout in the USA and is actively engaged in disenfranchising demographics that don't share their worldviews. They certainly will oppose efforts to make it easier to vote.

And there is a certain party who has certain captured voting blocks that tend to work shifts and hourly jobs for places that stay open on 'mandatory' holidays. Those people would not be helped by this, or do you think joy those who work 9-5 salaried office jobs deserve special accommodations to vote?

Is this a trick question? I believe that every eligible American citizen should be able to exercise their constitutional right to vote, this is an idea known as franchisement. I don't believe there is such thing as special accommodations when the goal is to make sure every citizen has the ability to exercise such rights.

no what djrogers says is that the Democrats will never move it to sunday, or make it a holiday, because (rightly) that's terrible for a lot of people who work shift jobs and work in the service industry.

You should be careful - your presumptions of fairness betray your own privilege in a way that make hypocrisy of your own political predilection.

I never endorsed any given plan, I pointed out that any given plan will be resisted by people who find it politically expedient to do so. I'm no political scientist, but Im almost willing to guarantee that if you took a bunch of them and asked them to devise a strategy to help most Americans vote they'd be able to do so. And this strategy would be resisted. Of course any given idea will have its own drawbacks, but that doesn't mean it should just be tossed out wholesale.

Can you tell me more about my privilege and why exactly I should be careful? Since you've found a way to infer my life experiences from a paragraph of text, I've never found growing up black and poor in a violent neighborhood to grant me 'privilege' (nor does my current life leave me with that impression), but if you're suggesting I have such options available please enlighten me.

>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.

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.

Not everywhere, and there are a lot of exceptions. Paid time off is also not a requirement.

source: https://justworks.com/blog/can-i-leave-work-to-vote-check-yo...

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