Here's Why Election Day Should be a National Holiday

Making sure workers have time to vote is just the beginning.

In 2018, the nonpartisan civic engagement organization Vote.org pioneered the movement of asking businesses to make Election Day a company holiday so workers would have at least two hours off to vote.

The idea took hold, and by 2020 over 1,000 companies representing 1.8 million employees had signed Vote.org’s pledge. Other nonprofits launched similar pledges, and companies like the outdoor retailer Patagonia set the model for companies signing the pledges by closing down all stores on every Election Day since 2016.

But this patchwork of efforts focused on time off to vote (and, more recently, time off to serve as a poll worker) falls short of what we could accomplish if Election Day was a national holiday focused around volunteerism where all Americans would have ample time to vote, spend the day volunteering for a civic organization, or otherwise make their voices heard in their local communities.

I recently attended a bipartisan panel of youth political leaders—the panelists were two representatives from Democratic organizations and two from Republican Party orgs, including the College Republicans. All four panelists were in strong agreement that there’s deep apathy among young voters (generally speaking, voters aged 18-29). These voters just have very little interest in voting for any of the 2024 Presidential candidates.

Interestingly, there was also broad bipartisan agreement on the panel around the underlying reasons for youth voter apathy:

• First, young voters either weren’t alive during 9/11 or were too young to remember it. Because of that, they have no reference point for the entire country being unified around a common purpose or experience. To them, our politics has always been the miserable, polarized, extremist morass that it is today.

• Relatedly, they have little if any experience of the country’s institutions functioning properly or doing anything useful for them. They’re graduating into a poor job market with high cost of living, they’re inheriting a planet on fire, and they’re looking forward to a future where they’ll have fewer rights than their parents had.

• Finally, we don’t teach civics in school anymore, so young voters don’t believe that casting a ballot can play a role in unifying the country or changing institutions for the better. Many Americans are skeptical their vote makes a difference—young Americans are convinced theirs doesn’t.

This is where a National Election Day of Service focused around volunteerism could help mend the frayed fabric of our society in the eyes of young voters. It would be an opportunity to prove that on the same day we’re at our most partisan, we can also come together around common, nonpartisan causes to make a difference in our own communities.

To be sure, there are a host of factors related to the particular candidates and issues that are contributing to young voters’ apathy this election.

But by using Election Day itself to strengthen democracy through public service while also fighting young voters’ sense of hopelessness and disillusionment with elections, maybe we’ll help motivate them—and ourselves—to volunteer and vote in the future.