What to do About Record Low Voter Turnout? Call a Holiday!

"*Universal Voter Registration would modernize voter registration in the United States, making government responsible for maintaining accurate and complete voter rolls, shifting our system from its current opt-in structure to an opt-out structure."

These are all sound proposals, and some of them have been implemented with considerable success in communities across the country. Taking them national involves organizing and hard work.

But is there something more we can do right now -- something that should be easy and without significant controversy?

How about making Election Day a holiday? That's hardly a radical idea. Countries around the world schedule elections on weekends or recognize weekdays when elections are held as a holiday. Louisiana usually votes on Saturdays. And roughly a dozen states and jurisdictions give some recognition to Election Day as a holiday. So why not take the idea national?

That's what Senator Sanders is proposing. Even before November 4, the independent from Vermont argued that, as part of a broader effort to generate the largest possible turnout. "Election Day should be a national holiday so that everyone has the opportunity to vote."

After the turnout crisis became evident -- even in his own traditionally high-turnout state of Vermont, where voter participation fell to 43.7 percent, the worst rate on record -- Sanders acted. He proposed the "Democracy Day Act of 2014" -- a simple piece of legislation that would designate each and every federal Election Day as a public holiday.

"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," says Sanders."We can and must do better than that. While we must also focus on campaign finance reform and public funding of elections, establishing an Election Day holiday would be an important step forward."

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