Take Back Tuesday

  

            Created by Rainn Wilson (The Office’s Dwight Schrute), this silly video serves as a pitch to make Election Day a federal holiday. In the video, a 19^th century sharecropper makes the journey to the polls in order to vote in present-day California. The video emphasizes the difficulty of the man’s journey and the archaic aspects of voting on Tuesday. Once he arrives at the polls, voters are standing in line to cast their ballots, while discussing the costs of their decision to go vote; two people express the desire to be able to vote online, representing the value they place on their time and the opportunity cost of voting. One man complains about being late for work. The ultimate purpose of this video is to serve as a pitch for a federal holiday in order to increase voter turnout.

By making Election Day a federal holiday, some of these costs could be avoided, making voting a more rational (though likely still not rational) decision than it currently is. Voters would present to poles continuously throughout the day, rather than in big throngs of people at open and close with big lulls in between. In addition, by promoting the spirit of democracy/the right to vote and celebrating that right, perhaps voters would be more excited to vote and derive greater utility from participating in the political process.