Vote!, originally uploaded by plemeljr

Talking over pizza and beer last night, how un pro-American of us, my friend the foreign national asked why election day wasn’t a bank holiday to let people vote. No one in the room could figure out why, with all of the platitudes about voting being an American tradition, election day wasn’t a federal holiday to allow all Americans to vote.
This became clearer when I read today’s NY Times, Safety Concerns Eclipse Civic Lessons as Schools Cancel Classes on Election Day:

School officials and parents across the nation are turning an increasingly critical eye on the time-honored tradition of voters’ casting ballots in the gymnasiums and hallways of neighborhood school buildings while classes go on as usual just a few yards away.
Citing a litany of safety concerns, many officials are opting to keep youngsters home on Nov. 4, Election Day.

You would think that allowing everyone the day off to celebrate democracy would make sense. But as (I think) Big Media Matt had discussed, America’s right to vote stems not from a positivist position, but rather from a negative definition of who cannot vote (women, slaves, etc). The historical accident of allowing only white men who owned land voting rights has trickled down through the years into a rag-tag series of more inclusive and permissive voting rights; resulting in strange accident of pundits, the elite and conventional wisdom poo-poohing the lack of voter turnout every election when there are structural barriers to voting for large segments of the population.