Thousands of volunteers across the country are preparing for today's historic election. Here in Wisconsin, field workers are preparing to give rides and make reminder phone calls to voters while lawyers throughout the state are reviewing election laws, preparing to take the day off from work to make sure that every vote gets counted. But reports from Florida and Virginia that voters have had to wait for up to eight hours in order to vote are provoking concern and outrage that perhaps even the best organized campaign in American history won't be able to make sure that all of its supporters see the inside of a voting booth. Who are the most likely to be unable to wait for hours before casting their ballots? Voters with employers who don't see the value of their employees making their voices heard. Voters who might actually want to elect political representatives who would fight for universal health care and higher minimum wage laws: voters who aren't rich.

Unlike many other democratic countries, the U.S. doesn't have an election-day holiday, despite semi-recent proposed legislation calling for one. In fact, in some states, polls close as early as 6 p.m.
A study from the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance shows that the United States ranks 139th out of 172 democratic countries when it comes to voter turnout over the past 60 years. Some argue that these low levels of participation are a direct result of making voting hard for people who work. Rep. Steve Israel, D-NY, and Norm Ornstein, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, founded the non-profit "Why Tuesday?" to promote their argument that Tuesday-voting results in depressed voter turnout, unfairly penalizing low-income voters and single parents, who may have to choose between working and voting. While employers are required to give employees at least two hours off, the early-voting lines at polling places in several states today far exceeded that.
Hopefully, state election authorities will use the disturbing experiences of voters today to implement changes such as increased check-in points and more poll workers to shorten lines for voters tomorrow. But even if lawmakers choose not to pursue an election-day holiday, Congress should to make such planning mandatory before the next presidential election. In Bush v. Gore, the Supreme Court acknowledged that Florida voters had experienced a violation of their due process rights by being forced to wait in such long lines (although stating, in dicta, that that portion of the opinion had no precedential value). Congress should require that states implement procedures to ensure that wait times for voters do not exceed a maximum agreed upon wait time by including such mandates in bills like the Help America Vote Act. Perhaps my ideal of 30 minutes is too small a window--but two hours is certainly too long. Today, most of the more than 100 million people who will attempt to vote will also have to work. Voters shouldn't even have to consider choosing between the two--that's the wrong kind of choice to have to make on Election Day.