It must be a Sunday

It must be a Sunday

because the international headlines include

Croats vote in presidential race

I don't have the numbers or evidence to back it up but I did a lot of Sunday newscasts in my radio days where we were really looking hard for stories, and foreign elections seemed to pop up a lot. So I have the impression that most countries vote on weekends instead of trying to squeeze the electoral process into a work day. I'll bet it makes it easier to find workers, and it probably plays a role in higher turnout too.

If there's nothing to say, blogging can sit and wait. But in the world of broadcasting, you have to fill the time. "There's no news today" followed by dead air is not an acceptable newscast.

Sunday newscasts are not nearly as bad as holiday newscasts. At New Years you have a couple standbys to fill the time - the year end summaries and the annual changes in the law story.

Christmas Eve is the worst. You have to go with the long version of the weather, naturally. After that you're really stalled. In my NPR days we had a general news policy of not reading lotto numbers and car accidents, and not much if-it-bleeds-it-leads crime. The idea was that the commercial stations had that covered with the News Chopper and the public radio audience actually wants to hear about the Croatian election.

But on Christmas Eve you've got to scrounge for every pileup and Powerball you can find. One year I actually had to resort to the annual radar tracking Santa's reindeer bit. But the next Christmas, my last in journalism, Gorbachev dissolved the Soviet Union. That gave us plenty of news.

Anyway. There's more tangent than content in this post.

My county has lots of experience with early voting which takes the workday factor out of turnout. But Delaware, Hawaii, and Louisiana have actually conducted entire elections on Saturdays. My quick search didn't find any turnout stats and you'd have to figure out how to control for other ease of voting factors. There's also the Election Day as holiday concept, which I have to admit I haven't thought about very much for the simple egocentric reason that, given my political life, I'm going to be working anyway.