It's Tuesday exactly two weeks out from Nov. 6, Election Day.
Why is voting day for American federal elections always a
Tuesday? The answer is a bit obscure and has to do with buggies.
Let me explain. The story starts all the way back with the
Founding Fathers. "The Constitutional Convention just met for a
very brief time during the summer of 1787," Senate Historian Don
Ritchie says. "By the time they got finished they were exhausted
and they hadn't made up their minds on a lot of things." They
were pooped. So they left the question of when federal elections
should be held undecided. Without that laid out, states were
left to set their own voting dates, which meant several decades
of electoral chaos. Ritchie describes it as a "crazy quilt of
elections" held at all different times, all over the country.
Finally, in 1845, Congress decided to get things under control.
Ritchie says lawmakers reasoned that Monday was out because
people would have to travel to the polls in their buggies on
Sunday, the Sabbath (this