Should election day be a national holiday?

It would align the US with other countries

Question: Should election day be a national holiday?
Position1 of 2›: Yes, election day should be a national holiday
Argument1 of 3›: It would align the US with other countries

Making weekday elections a national holiday is a popular idea that would align the US with other countries. It is time that the United States starts taking proactive measures to make participating in democracy as easy and as accessible as it is in other foreign countries.

The argument

Election day should be made into a national holiday because it would align the United States with other foreign countries. There are 36 countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, an intergovernmental economic organization with 37 member countries, and the US is one of seven that doesn’t designate election day a national holiday. The United States is out of step with the rest of the world. Nations like Israel and South Korea make election day a national holiday and have voter turnout rates of 72.3% and 77.2% respectively, which is significantly higher than that of the US. Singapore has election day as a federal holiday, and in 2015 this resulted in a voter turnout of 93.6%. Foreign sovereignties like France, Mexico, and India also observe national holidays for elections. All of these countries have made election day a national holiday in order to make it easier and more convenient for their citizens to vote. The United States should do the same.

Premises

[P1]The United States is one of only seven OECD nations that does not make election day a national holiday, leaving it out of step with much of the developed world. [P2] Countries that do—Israel, South Korea, Singapore, France, Mexico, and India—report higher voter turnout, having adopted the holiday to make voting easier and more convenient for their citizens. [C] Election day should be a national holiday because doing so would align the US with other countries.

Counter-arguments

Election day should not be made into a national holiday. The countries that have made election day into a holiday have either not seen significant increases in voter turnout or they have only because they have employed other strategies as well. For instance, Singapore seeing a voter turnout of 93.6% for the 2015 election of their Prime Minister was not only because they have an election day holiday; the holiday is not even the primary reason. Singapore had such a high voter turnout because they have a mandatory voting law. If citizens choose not to vote, those citizens must pay a fine. Mandatory voting laws are the types of strategies that the US should employ to increase voter turnout. An election day holiday is not the solution America needs to solve its voting problems.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] Being unusual among OECD members is not itself a reason to change; the premise offers a comparison rather than an argument, and several of the countries named differ from the United States in ways — compulsory voting, automatic registration, weekend polling, nationally run election administration — that make alignment on the holiday alone a superficial match. [Rejecting P2] The turnout figures come from countries with those other measures already in place, so they cannot isolate the holiday's contribution; and a day off does not reach the voters most constrained by work, since shift, service and hourly employees are the least likely to receive one.