Cut Your Election Day Accident Risk…(Why Tuesday?)
In 1845, Congress voted to make the first Tuesday in November “election day”. Why Tuesday? It seems Sunday was out because it was a holy day, and most farmers needed a day to travel by horse to their county seat to cast ballots, so if they left on Monday, then Tuesday was the natural choice. They could then be back home by Wednesday, which was “market day”. Here’s another reason we might consider somehow improving on this older-than-slavery Tuesday tradition…
Unless you voted early, hopefully tomorrow if you’re in the U.S. you will be going out to vote. But before you go out on election day—either as a pedestrian or a driver —consider this new study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association. It showed that your chances of being killed in a car, or by a car, on an election day is 18% greater than on a typical Tuesday.
These researchers studied crash data from all U.S. presidential elections from 1976 through 2004 and found a consistent pattern that it was significantly more dangerous to be out on election day. On a typical day (shocking enough to realize), an average 134 people are killed in car accidents, but on an election day the number rises to 158. And of course, many more are injured.
The researchers didn’t have any sure answers as to why this occurred, but suspected that more people were driving those days, maybe more were distracted, or taking new routes to find their polling places. Perhaps there was a bad combination of more older drivers on the roads mixed with impatient younger drivers trying to squeeze in voting to and from work. If people had more time to vote—and working people didn’t have to rush to vote—not only might more people vote, but it might be more relaxed and safer.
So this Tuesday, be extra alert on the road for slower drivers, or people jaywalking to and from their polling places. In the future, it’s another good reason to vote early if you can, or by mail, and perhaps we in the U.S. need to consider changing our Tuesday tradition and move to weekend voting, as it is practiced by most advanced countries. If interested, read about this non-profit organization Why Tuesday?
