Colorado Democrats Scrap Plan To Make Election Day A Holiday

DENVER, CO – By Alex Burness for The Colorado Independent. Voting rights advocates across the country have long believed Election Day should be a legal holiday. Millions of non-voters say they’re too busy to cast ballots, so the thinking goes that if more people have Election Day off, voter participation will increase.

This was the same logic of Colorado Democrats who drafted a bill in January to make Election Day a state holiday. The bill, sponsored by Rep. Adrienne Benavidez in the House and Sen. Julie Gonzales in the Senate, also proposed to repeal Columbus Day, which dozens of local and state governments have renounced in recent years, and in many cases replaced with an Indigenous Peoples Day.

On Thursday, Benavidez, of Adams County, was to present her repeal-and-replace holiday bill before a legislative committee, but at the outset of the hearing she announced a change in plans: her bill would no longer affect Election Day, and would instead focus only on renaming Columbus Day as Colorado Day.

Though the Election Day-as-a-holiday measure was introduced in an effort to expand voting access, it fizzled, counterintuitively, because some are concerned the bill would have actually decreased turnout.

As drafted, it would have applied only to public employees, since the government cannot compel the private sector to take off Election Day, or for that matter on any day.

Groups that advocate for voting rights, including New Era Colorado, contacted legislators ahead of Thursday’s hearing to raise the fear that closing state government on Election Day would also mean closing or limiting access to transit lines, community centers, libraries and college campus buildings — facilities and services many voters rely on to get to work or school, or to cast their ballots.

READ MORE in The Colorado Independent

Voters head into a voting center at the Blair-Caldwell African American Research Library in Denver on Election Day in 2018. (Photo by Alex Burness)