Davis / 4 Senator Alkanli

S. W.

A BILL
To designate federal Election Day as a public holiday.
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Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled,
SECTION 1. SHORT TITLE
This act may be cited as the Election Day Holiday Act of 2016.
SECTION 2. FINDINGS
Congress hereby finds and declares that,
1) The 2008 Presidential election holds the record for voter turnout with 63% of eligible voters voting, yet 37% did
not express their opinions that day.
2) In the last presidential election, over 47,000 ballots were thrown out. Rejection rates in elections since then have
gotten worse. For so many working people who have families, kids, multiple jobs and are balancing so much if
they go to the wrong polling location there is absolutely no reason that their vote should be thrown out.
3) We should not be satisfied with a "democracy" in which more than 60 percent of our people don't vote and some
80 percent of young people and low-income Americans fail to vote.
4)The Brennan Center released a report that shows that voting law changes across the nation will make it
significantly harder for more than 5 million voters to exercise their constitutional right to vote.
5) Some states require voters to show government-issued photo identification, often of a type that as many as one in
ten voters do not have.
6) Chelsea Clinton's class of 2001 recently set a new record for political apathy among college freshmen: only 27
percent said that keeping up with politics was an important priority for them, as opposed to 58 percent of the class of
1970, with whom Bill and Hillary Clinton attended college.
7) Even more profoundly, the 2000 and 2002 elections both revealed that the electoral process itself is evolving due
to the impact of new information technologies, especially computer literacy and accessibility.
8) Our data show that between 4 and 6 million votes were lost in the 2000 election.
9) Five of these 10 studies found that ID requirements had no statistically significant effect on turnout; in contrast 4
studies found decreases in turnout and 1 found an increase in turnout that were statistically significant.
10) However, after years of legislative fights and court cases, California had a method of
electing its officials that allowed the voter to vote secretly.
11)many towns without power and emergency response workers continued to work long shifts to get the state back
on track. Because of Connecticuts strict absentee voting requirements, many affected citizens were not able to cast
absentee ballots and therefore had to forfeit their right to participate in the election.
12)should be expected to receive opposition from the Republican side of the aisle as the conservatives would think
the measure is intended to favor liberals.
SECTION 3. STATUTORY LANGUAGE
A) The Election Day Holiday Act of 2016 shall amend Section 6103 of the United States code, title 5, to designate
federal Election Day as a public holiday. The amendment shall be inserted after the matter relating to Columbus Day
and shall state the following undesignated paragraph: Federal Election Day, the Tuesday next after the first Monday
in November of each even-numbered year. Government departments such as public schools, post offices, banks, and
libraries will be closed while election offices are open. Employees of individual businesses who are not required to
work on a federal holiday are entitled to a day off with pay. Election offices will be made available to both part-time
and full-time workers, and businesses are responsible for ensuring full-time workers get hours off to vote.
B) The United States code will be responsible for ensuring this public holiday.
C) This bill shall be enacted on January 1, 2017. There is no expiration date for this bill.