Why Does America Always Vote on a Tuesday?

To allow people to go to church on Sunday, Congress figured holding elections on Tuesdays would allow people to travel on Monday, vote on Tuesday, and return home by Wednesday. Congress went as far as making Election Day the first Tuesday after the first Monday of November because they wanted to make sure that voting never took place on November 1, since November 1 is All Saints Day for the Roman Catholic Church.

Importance of Voting

If you ever think that just one vote in a sea of millions cannot make much of a difference, consider some of the closest elections in U.S. history. In 2000, Al Gore narrowly lost the Electoral College vote to George W. Bush. The election came down to a recount in Florida, where Bush had won the popular vote by such a small margin that it triggered an automatic recount and a Supreme Court case (Bush v. Gore). In the end, Bush won Florida by 0.009 percent of the votes cast in the state, or 537 votes. Had 600 more pro-Gore voters gone to the polls in Florida that November, there may have been an entirely different president from 2000-2008.