Obama Just Endorsed the Idea of Making Election Day a Holiday

Impact

President Barack Obama is a fan of any policy that increases voter turnout. Last year he talked about how mandatory voting, as practiced in Australia, would have a "transformative" impact on American democracy. Now he's shown interest in the idea of making Election Day a holiday.

Dan Corey, the editor-in-chief of Rutgers University's newspaper the Daily Targum, asked Obama during an interview published Thursday whether the United States should follow the lead of countries in which "the government automatically registers voters and holds elections on days that are weekend days or national holidays."

Read more: There's a New Way to Register to Vote — And It Could Revolutionize American Elections

Obama responded enthusiastically in the affirmative. His response is worth quoting at length:

Absolutely. We are the only advanced democracy that makes it deliberately difficult for people to vote. And some of it has to do with the nature of our history and our Constitution, where we allow individual states to determine their own processes for structuring elections within certain boundaries.

Unfortunately, at the moment, advocates for increasing access to the voting booth are not in a place to focus their energy on making Election Day a federal holiday, as they have to spend most of it trying to defend the current system from the ongoing Republican effort to impose new voting restrictions.

h/t Slate