A lone voter casts his vote at the Community Center on November 4 in Garwin, Iowa. (Steve Pope/Getty Images)It's an idea that often resurfaces in even-numbered years, as the country's sad record of civic engagement comes into focus. In the United States, about 60 percent of eligible adults vote in presidential elections and about 40 percent in the midterms—levels far below the 70 to 90 percent rates consistent among most other long-established democracies. "If the vast majority of voters were given Election Day ... as a paid holiday, the crowds at the voting booths might approach in size the crowds that now flood shopping centers on Columbus Day," contended a 1990 letter to the editor in The New York Times. Martin P. Wattenberg, who advocated an Election Day holiday in a 1998 essay for The Atlantic (which is owned by the same parent company as National Journal), said he grew interested in the topic after seeing a bumper sticker about the 1994 Republican takeover of Congress: "NEWT HAPPENS WHEN ONLY 37 PERCENT OF AMERICANS VOTE."

Liberal slogans aside, "Democracy Day," as some proposals have dubbed it, enjoys bipartisan support. In 2005, to mark the 40th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act, former Democratic Sen. Bill Bradley and former Republican Rep. Jack Kemp helped found an organization called "Why Tuesday?" that has sought ever since to increase turnout; proposals include making Election Day a holiday or moving it to the weekend, and expanding absentee and early voting. When the group has interviewed politicians about its ideas, figures including former Republican Sen. Richard Lugar and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton have expressed support for the federal holiday.

"When you're talking about people who don't vote in America, it's working-class people, really," says Jacob Soboroff, a Why Tuesday? board member. People who work for hourly wages; who can't take time off to vote for fear of losing their jobs; who have young kids or other commitments that keep them from the polls—this profile, he says, does not belong exclusively to either party.

Soboroff says the holiday idea has taken on new resonance since the Supreme Court invalidated Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, which combatted the disenfranchisement of minority voters by requiring that nine states and numerous smaller jurisdictions with histories of discrimination obtain federal approval each time they sought to change their voting laws. "After [that section of] the VRA was struck down, this has come up in conversations about how to fix it," Soboroff says. The new holiday would not "directly address" the changes wrought by the Court's decision, "but it's a way to protect some of those communities," he says.

"When you're talking about people who don't vote in America, it's working-class people, really," says Jacob Soboroff, a Why Tuesday? board member.

Still, such a holiday looks like an unlikely addition to the calendar. Norman Ornstein, another Why Tuesday? cofounder, as well as a resident scholar at the conservative American Enterprise Institute (and a contributing editor and columnist for National Journal), thinks moving voting to the weekend is more likely to gain traction. First of all, closing businesses on a Tuesday would come at a cost to the economy, he says. And trying to solve that problem by trading in, or combining Election Day with, an existing holiday would only create other problems. "Every time doing it on Veterans Day has been raised, veterans groups are deeply unhappy," Ornstein says. As for Presidents Day, "you'll end up with criticism that we've already collapsed these presidential birthdays"— George Washington's and Abraham Lincoln's—into a single holiday meant to celebrate "the giants we've had as presidents, and you'll dilute it further from making that happen." With Ornstein's encouragement, Democratic Rep. Steve Israel of New York has sponsored a weekend-voting bill, but the measure's future is murky. "As for when it gets done—who knows whether anything gets done in the foreseeable future?" Ornstein says.

In the meantime, Why Tuesday? likes to ask politicians and Washington sophisticates whether they know the answer to the question in its name. Election Day, contrary to many of the answers they receive, isn't set in the Constitution. In 1845, Congress voted to hold federal elections on the Tuesday after the first Monday in November—because lawmakers figured farmers would need Monday to make it into town by horse-drawn buggy after the all-important Sunday Sabbath. "That's the irony," Soboroff says. "It was all about making voting convenient."