Here’s a look at some American voting traditions ahead of the 2024 U.S. presidential election
Posted November 4, 2024 5:07 pm.
Last Updated November 4, 2024 7:07 pm.
Millions of Americans will head to the polls on Tuesday to cast their final votes in the 2024 U.S. presidential election.
The latest polling suggests the race is a toss-up between Democrat Kamala Harris and Republican Donald Trump.
In the United States, presidential elections take place every four years, but why does it happen on a Tuesday in November?
According to historians like Stephen L. Newman, professor emeritus at York University in Toronto, U.S. presidential elections are four years apart because of the term limits set out in the American constitution, which also limits the number of terms a president may serve to two.
“Federal elections in the U.S. take place on the Tuesday following the first Monday in November since the mid-nineteenth century,” Newman explains. “Election day was established by federal law in 1845.”
“Prior to the passage of this law, several states could determine for themselves when to hold elections within a 34-day period before the first Wednesday in December, when the electors of the Electoral College formally met to cast their ballots,” he added. “Congress imposed a uniform election day to avoid having the results in states that voted early influence the results in states that voted later.”
During the 19th century, Newman says, much of the U.S. economy was reliant on farming and agricultural production. Because of this, it was decided that Election Day would be best held in November, after harvest season and before the arrival of winter.
According to Newman, Election Day falls on a Tuesday because, at the time, most Americans went to church on Sundays and may have needed to travel far distances to reach their polling place.
“Holding elections on Tuesday gave them time to get there,” Newman explained.
Electoral law has changed over the decades. Originally, women and Black Americans did not have the right to vote, but that began to change shortly after the civil war with the introduction of the 14th and 15th Amendment, which granted former slaves U.S. citizenship and the right to vote.
In the decades after, southern states proceeded to suppress the votes of Black Americans through various restrictions, like literacy tests and poll taxes.
“Reconstruction came to an end and the former Confederate states, aided and abetted by a sympathetic federal judiciary, systematically deprived Blacks of their civil rights, including the right to vote,” Newman explained. “A remedy to this injustice was not achieved until 1965 with the passage of the Voting Rights Act, although voter suppression remains a problem even today.”
By the early 20th century, the demand for women’s suffrage was gaining momentum from the broader women’s rights movement. Suffragettes like Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton were involved in a decades-long campaign to amend the constitution and enfranchise women.
On August 18, 1920, the 19th amendment was ratified giving women the right to vote, but this did not exempt Black women from state laws that suppressed Black voters.
In the last three election cycles, including the 2018 midterms, thousands of voters have flocked to Susan B. Anthony’s grave in Rochester, New York to honour her activism by leaving their “I voted” stickers on her headstone.
The practice is one of the latest informal U.S. voting traditions to pop up in recent years.
Similarly, in 2016, when Hillary Clinton was running for president, some women showed up to cast their ballots dressed in white, a colour that became symbolic of the woman’s suffrage movement. That tradition is expected to continue on Tuesday as Kamala Harris vies to become America’s first woman president.
Some other Election Day traditions include an Ohio bakery that has held a “presidential cookie poll” since 1982. Busken Bakery in Cincinnati says it has accurately predicted the next president in nine out of 10 elections.
The bakery sells cookies with each candidate’s face painted on them and then counts each sale to determine who will win. Customers are advised to “chews wisely.”
Tuesday’s election will see some of the earliest polls on the East Coast close at 6:00 p.m. ET. The last ballots to be counted will come from Hawaii and Alaska, where polls are expected to close at 12:00 a.m. ET. A final call may not be called until days after the election.
Follow CityNews’ live coverage of the U.S. 2024 presidential election here.
