Our group was founded by personal acquaintances of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. to honor the 40th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act, for which Dr. King fought for and won for all Americans.

Today, January 15th, is Dr. King’s birthday. But “Martin Luther King, Jr. Day,” a national holiday in the United States where government offices and many private businesses are closed, always falls on the third Monday in January, making a three-day weekend for the people of the United States. Other presidents’ birthdays, and Columbus Day, were also “moved” to make for three-day-weekends, and even Thanksgiving was moved by FDR to try and stimulate the economy.

Our question is this: if the birthday of one of our nation’s most famous election reformers can be moved to make for a three-day-weekend, why can’t Election Day be moved from the Tuesday after the first Monday in November, where it has been since 1845, to make voting more accessible in a country where voting ranks near the bottom of all countries in the world?

We don’t know the answer either. To find out why we vote on Tuesday, click here.

Join our movement to fix America’s broken voting system by following Why Tuesday? on Twitter.

Posted in Civil Rights, Election Reform, Martin Luther King, Jr. | Comments Off

In May, we brought you the story of how New York State was atwitter – in reality and online – about how best to ditch a vestigial organ of elections past: the lever voting machine. Today New York City is finally doing it, and not without further debate, David W. Chen reports this morning for the New York Times.

After years of delays and fierce lobbying, the city’s Board of Elections on Tuesday afternoon selected Election Systems and Software, an Omaha company, to provide new electronic voting machines in time for the September 2010 primary.

Voters will now be required to fill out paper ballots with ovals, similar to SAT exams, before feeding them into a fax-like scanner.

The change means that New York City will finally be in compliance with the federal Help America Vote Act of 2002. That law was passed to avoid a repeat of the recount debacle in Florida after the 2000 presidential election, and to help disabled people vote.

For more on the switch, read the complete story here.

You can watch me watching others attempt to use the machines that led to the Help America Vote Act of 2002 in this vlog. Hope you have a laugh.

Photo of NY lever voting machine via the schneider clan on Flickr.

Posted in Election Reform, Lever Machines, New York | Comments Off

Please join me and these other awesome speakers Tuesday in NYC from 4-6PM for this event at Baruch College! I’ll be talking about how nonprofits can use online video like we did at Why Tuesday? – and more. No promises about how to interview President Obama, though. You can RSVP online here. Click the image above for a bigger version.

Posted in New York, PDF | Comments Off