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Election Day Reimagined as a Joyful Celebration
I’ve been thinking a lot about holidays lately, and about how to make them enjoyable and sticky — and now how to apply that to Election Day.
Recently (in the Astral Codex comment section) I applied some of my ideas to “Democracy Day”, an imaginary holiday that coincides with Election Day and celebrates Democracy in America. Now, in honor of the election, I have expanded a bit on those ideas and turned them into this post.
Why Democracy Day?
This started as a throw-away comment about The Fourth of July. It is a great holiday. The parades, the picnics, the fireworks… They make for a wonderful celebration with family and friends. It’s fun as a birthday party for the United States.
However, some of the important things I think the day should remind us of — values like freedom and democracy, for example — get a bit lost in the celebration.
On the other hand, the day we have that is actually devoted to democracy — Election Day — has issues: Long lines, low turnout, getting time off from work, dull media coverage…
And so, if I had a chance to design a new holiday to celebrate democracy in America (in addition to The Fourth of July, not to replace it), here’s how I would do it.
Designing Democracy Day
Step one, I would put the new holiday to Election Day. For two reasons: 1) No one forgets that Election Day is coming, so there’s a natural prompt built in, and 2) voting in elections is the most important ritual of democracy, so what better day to do it?
If we’re being honest, however, voting isn’t all that sexy in and of itself, so we want to wrap it up in other traditions that are more enjoyable, but ideally still relevant to democracy. That’s where the next steps come in.
Step two is to make Election Day a public holiday and move it to a Wednesday.
Wednesday? Yes, we want people to have the day off. However, we also want people to stay in their voting districts, so we have to make it as difficult as possible to make a long weekend of it.
