Citizens of San Francisco are one step closer to having elections over the weekend. The Saturday Voting Act Ordinance received the required amount of signatures and will be placed on the ballot for voters to say whether or not this idea becomes reality. The San Francisco Examiner has the details:

Ordinances require 7,168 signatures from registered San Francisco voters to make it onto the ballot.

If approved, the first time Saturday voting would occur would be for the November 2011 election, when voters will elect San Francisco’s next mayor.

Alex Tourk, a lobbyist and head of Ground Floors Public Affairs, is the official proponent of the proposed ballot measure.

“San Francisco residents deserve a voting system which corresponds to the schedules and lifestyles of working families. Allowing voting on Saturday would encourage parents to involve their children in the democratic process,” the ordinance says. The measure refers to a nationwide movement known as “Why Tuesday?”

How it would work is the Department of Elections would open up about 400 polling stations throughout The City for voting to occur the Saturday before the election day that occurs on Tuesday.

The measure says Saturday voting would increase voter turnout and make voting more accessible to families. If the pilot program is proven effective, then the measure urges the mayor and Board of Supervisors to figure out how to implement and pay for Saturday voting for future elections.

For more information on the campaign, visit Why Tuesday? San Francisco.

Photo of 2008 Election Day in San Fran by maneo on Flickr.

Why do we vote on Tuesday? You will not find the answer below, in the Declaration of Independence. Nor is it in our Constitution. Find out why here.

This Independence Day, join us in honoring those that fight for our freedoms at home and abroad by working to make America’s democracy stronger as many before us have done. Click on the image above for a close-up view of the document that started it all.

In today’s New York Times John Harwood asks a question about tomorrow’s midterm primary elections, “Angry Voters, But How Many?”, which got our attention. He highlights the fact that not only was turnout for Barack Obama’s historic 2008 election underwhelming, but that it’s probably not going to get much better than that this time around.

In 2008, when Mr. Obama’s candidacy galvanized Democrats and intrigued the nation, nearly 4 in 10 Americans declined to vote. Even at peak interest, the American appetite for democratic rituals is hardly universal.

Without a presidential race to lead the ballot, the appetite is even weaker. The last time more than half of the eligible citizens voted in a midterm election was nearly three decades ago, in 1982, census figures show.

Students of modern political history point out that this is often a problem for Democrats. Their less-affluent constituency traditionally goes to the polls at lower rates.

“We usually do well when the turnout is low,” said John Morgan, a longtime Republican demographic specialist.

Comparing 2010 to one election with modest turnout in which his party captured both houses of Congress, Mr. Morgan observed, “This smells like 1946.”

Elections with low turnout can allow parties to tilt the outcome substantially through small shifts in the composition of those voting.

In the 1994 midterms, for example, overall turnout as a proportion of eligible citizens dropped slightly. But since Representative Newt Gingrich’s party was energized that year and President Bill Clinton’s was downcast, the result earned the moniker “Republican Revolution.”

“You can have a big-wave result,” Mr. Cook said, “without a big wave of voters.”

We’ll be monitoring tomorrow’s vote here. If you’re curious why we’re voting on Tuesday, the answer is here.

Photo of empty polling place via nonnormalizable on Flickr.

There’s a write-up by Jennifer Valentino-DeVries of our 140 Character Conference panel “Fixing Our Voting System One Tweet At A Time” on the Wall Street Journal’s website. She focuses on the theme of our panel, that there are ways social media can be used to increase and protect voter participation.

The use of Twitter as a vote-monitoring tool might have gained the most attention during the dramatic protests in Iran last year, but election experts in the U.S. say there are plenty of ways to use the service to improve voting in this country as well.

A fast-moving service such as Twitter can be the best way to get information about what is going on during elections, because it’s easier to access and doesn’t get tied up the way phone lines can, said California Secretary of State Debra Bowen. She said she has used the service to monitor what is happening in her state during elections, whether it’s a potential election-law problem or something less dire, such as the status of lines. “With 24,000 polling places, somebody is going to oversleep and forget the key” — and Twitter can help get out the message that these inevitable problems shouldn’t discourage people from voting, Ms. Bowen said at a Twitter confab called the 140 Character Conference, which gets its name from the number of characters allowed in tweets.

“This is something we can do without running to the lawyers on election day,” said Nancy Scola, an associate editor at techPresident, a blog that focuses on how campaigns are using the Web. “A lot of problems can be solved by people making noise” and can be resolved by open communication rather than election lawsuits, she said.

But the use of technologies like Twitter to encourage voter participation in the U.S. raises questions because not everyone has access to this type of service, and election watchers who use it are seeing only a small, savvy part of the population. “What does it mean when those of us with certain privileges and skills are online?” asked Andy Carvin, a senior strategist at National Public Radio.

For the complete article, click here.

For the video of our panel, click here.

Photo of WSJ via CAIVP on Flickr.

Thanks to (pictured L-R backstage at the 92nd Street Y in NYC) Joe Trippi, CA Secretary of State Debra Bowen, Nancy Scola, and Steve Grove  for being a part of my 140 Characters Conference panel Fixing Our Voting System One Tweet At A Time. If you want to find out more about the work we do at Why Tuesday? and how you can get involved, click here.

Tomorrow at 10AM at the 92nd Street Y in New York City come to my 140 Characters Conference panel Fixing Our Voting System One Tweet At A Time. 

I’ll be moderating with my Executive Director of Why Tuesday? hat on and we’ll be talking about how technology has a role to play in election reform. The panelists will be:

• Joe Trippi, social media, business and political consultant; Former Howard Dean campaign manager; author of The Revolution Will Not Be Televised
• Debra Bowen, California Secretary of State
• Nancy Scola, associate editor at Tech President; creator of Twitter Vote Report
  
• Steve Grove, head of YouTube news and politics

For the complete conference schedule which includes some awesome speakers and big names, click here.

The San Francisco Chronicle gave our efforts, and those of our friends in the Why Tuesday? San Francisco movement, their vote of confidence recently in this editorial.

A midweek election day made perfect sense in this nation’s agrarian past. Today, Tuesday voting is an anachronism that contributes to abysmal turnout rates, even in a political hotbed such as San Francisco.

As one of the city’s top political consultants, Alex Tourk knows all about the struggle to get voters to the polls. He is initiating a campaign to peel away one more excuse for not voting by adding Saturday as an election day. His proposed ballot measure would provide the first test of the national “Why Tuesday?” movement’s theory that weekend voting would bring more citizens to the polls - and produce the atmosphere of civic engagement that pervades election days in other nations that vote on the weekend.

If San Francisco voters approve this experiment - signatures are now being collected to put it on the November ballot - Saturday voting would be tried in the November 2011 city election. The extra cost would be covered by private donations.

It’s a worthy experiment in democracy. To learn more about the effort, or to request a petition, go to www.whytuesdaysf.org.

Photo of SF Chronicle Building via Flickr.

Today CSPAN launched a searchable online archive of video of all of their programs since 1987. Here’s the video of Why Tuesday? co-founder and board member Ambassador Andrew Young announcing the launch of our group in 2005, on the 40th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which he help author.

Exciting news! Our collective hard work to increase voter participation in the United States is paying off!

As you may have read this morning in the New York Times, the grassroots movement Why Tuesday? San Francisco is launching today to create a Saturday Election Day in their city! Their idea is to add a Saturday Election Day to the already-existing Tuesday voting to make voting as accessible and convenient as possible. But they can’t do it without you!

Visit WhyTuesdaySF.org now to find out more about the movement and what you can do to help.

The proposal needs thousands of signatures to make it on the ballot, and they can’t make it happen without you!

Visit WhyTuesdaySF.org now to find out more about the movement and what you can do to help.

In the words of U.S. Representative Steve Israel, who has twice introduced the Weekend Voting Act into the House of Representatives, “the best way to know if this is effective is to go ahead and do it. And if San Francisco can go ahead and do it, it could provide the hard data for the rest of the country.”

Visit WhyTuesdaySF.org now to find out more about the movement and what you can do to help.

Sad news. I heard via e-mail last night from election reformer Dennis Burke that Doris “Granny D” Haddock, the election and campaign finance reformer who walked across the country at the age of 89 to advocate for change died peacefully yesterday in her Dublin, New Hampshire family home at 7:18PM.

Dennis arranged for myself and my fellow Why Tuesday? staff members Thomas Macker and Barnett Zitron to visit Granny D in her home in late 2007. It was on a snowy day that I’ll never forget. Dennis shared the following information about Granny D, who you may know from the HBO documentary Run Granny Run:

Born in 1910 in Laconia, New Hampshire, she attended Emerson College and lived through two world wars and the Great Depression. She was an activist for her community and for her country, remaining active until the return of chronic respiratory problems four days ago.

She walked across the United States at the age of 90 in the year 2000, in a successful effort to promote the passage of the McCain-Feingold Campaign Finance Reform Act. In 2004, Granny D decided to challenge incumbent Senator Judd Gregg for his US Senate seat. She hoped to demonstrate that ordinary people can run for office and win with the support of small donations from individuals. Despite a shortened, grassroots campaign without the benefit of any advertising dollars, Granny D garnered an impressive 34% of the vote. During the past year five years, Granny D has traveled the country speaking about campaign finance reform and working on behalf of legislation for publicly-funded elections in New Hampshire.

In the 1960s, she and her husband, James Haddock, Sr., were instrumental in halting planned nuclear tests that would have destroyed a native fishing village and region in Alaska.

She raised two children, including the late Elizabeth Lawrenz of Washington D.C., and a son, Jim Haddock, who survives her and, with his wife, Libby, was at her side during many of her great adventures, including the final one today. She is also survived by eight grandchildren and 16 great grandchildren.

A public memorial service will be held this summer.

Her dedication to changing America’s broken political system is an inspiration to us all at Why Tuesday? and we will carry her in our memory as we continue our efforts to increase voter participation in the United States.

For more
BBC News: US campaign finance activist Granny D dies at 100
NPR: Campaign Finance Activist Granny D Dies At 100

Photo of Granny D via nhpaul on Flickr.