Voting Day Tuesday?

A couple days ago in class, we were watching a documentary about voting rights. It was asked why is the voting day on a Tuesday? The answer was that it highly benefitted the people in the 19th century as it gave the farmers one full traveling day to visit a polling site. I can see how this benefitted people in 1845 and the years following it. It just surprises me that we still voting day on Tuesday because of "tradition". I mean thats cool and all but I don't it's useful today and going forward. I did a little bit of digging and found this article( https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2018/11/06/why-is-election-day-always-a-tuesday-7-things-you-should-know-about-the-timing-of-u-s-voting/ ). 

It was mentioned in the article that some states offer early voting, all mailing voting, or just completely don't offer early voting. As they don't offer early voting and if somebody wants to put their vote in, they have to provide a reasonable excuse with proof that they can't vote on voting day. After coming up with their excuse, they would have to mail it which sounds like an annoying process. These are mostly in the eastern states.

A solution to increase the voting is by moving the voting day. Saturday and Sunday sound like amazing days to have a voting day because most people are busy during the weekend with their jobs. College students also are in school and are busy with their extracurricular activities. The only downside is that the weekend is used for religious purposes. As well, people travel away from home on the weekends which pushes them from voting. While some of these people are prevented from voting, I do believe that it will increase voter participation. 

A good solution for workers is getting paid time off on Election Day. Stanford professors, Adam Bonica and Michael McFaul, called businesses and universities if they would offer paid time off on election day and they said yes. This sounds like a fantastic idea because people would get paid time off and would encourage people to vote. A downside that I can think of is that people would use this time for other things and not vote. 

Overall, I think we should get rid of election day on Tuesday because of just "tradition". There are so many better solutions to this. Thanks for listening to my rant.