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"Why Tuesday? It's a good question. If you don't know why we head to the polls to cast our votes on Tuesdays, don't be embarrassed. Most politicians don't know either. Back in 1845, Congress...\n\n[\n\n](http://blog.teenvogue.com/photos/uncategorized/2008/08/28/wt_header_3.gif)\n\nWhy Tuesday? It's a good question. If you don't know why we head to the polls to cast our votes on Tuesdays, don't be embarrassed. Most politicians don't know either.\n\nBack in 1845, Congress picked Tuesday as the national voting day. The reasoning behind it? America was largely an agrarian society back then, and farmers needed a day that wouldn't interfere with the observance of the Sabbath. They also needed a day or two to travel since voting locations were often far away and voyaging by horse and buggy took awhile\u2014this ruled out Monday and Thursday. So it came down to Tuesday or Wednesday, and since Wednesday was market day in most towns, they went with Tuesday.\n\nIt was a logical choice back then, but now, things have changed. Our voting system's gone through a lot of revisions since the mid-nineteenth century\u2014take women's suffrage or civil rights, for example\u2014but we're still voting on Tuesdays. And it's become pretty problematic, as it essentially disenfranchises many Americans who can't make it to the polls that day for a variety of reasons like extended workdays, lack of public transportation to polling centers, school schedules, and so forth.\n\nHence the impetus behind Why Tuesday?, a nonpartisan and non-profit election reform organization started in 2005 that aims to make voting more convenient Approximately half of the US's eligible voting population actually votes; our turnout ranks 139th out of 172 when compared to other democratic countries (check out this chart). According to Why Tuesday?'s twenty-five year-old ecutive director Jacob Soboroff, the US census reports that about one fourth of the people who don't vote say that they didn't vote because they were \"too busy.\" This could mean anything from having to work or having to go to school to not being able to get a baby sitter. According to a Why Tuesday poll, many non-voters also said that our voting system should be more convenient. So in 2006, Soboroff and a few other Why Tuesday? volunteers hit the road, armed with video cameras. They asked several prominent politicians that simple question and taped their responses. Most of them had no idea: \"It's even stumped a lot of presidential candidates,\" Soboroff says.\n\n\"Voter participation is not a red issue or a blue issue, it's a red white and blue issue,\" Soboroff tells me. \"If you start with a simple question, it leads to a million questions. Why do we vote on Tuesdays? What kind of voting machines should we use? How should absentee ballots work? How early should we vote? And so on. You have to question the things you don't understand, especially when they're not making any sense.\"\n\nThe questioning worked &amp;amp;#x2013; sparking national interest and capturing the attention of many Washington insiders. The Weekend Voting Act has recently been introduced into the House of Representatives by Steve Israel and into the Senate by Herb Kohl. Why Tuesday? also even recently garnered the support of actress Kirsten Dunst, who's set to co-direct and co-produce an upcoming non-partisan documentary about increasing voter participation with Soboroff.\n\nCheck out the videos on whytuesday.org. &amp;amp;#x2013;LINDSAY TALBOT"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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