Today, Thursday 27 December, is election day in Kenya. Why Thursday? Why not Sunday, as it is done in large parts of the world? In Kenya, Thursday is not the first day of the weekend either, like it is in Algeria and other predominately Muslim countries - and where it is the preferred day for elections.
I guess Kenya's choice of Thursday is akin to the choice of Tuesday in the United States: random. Nothing in the US Constitution or the Declaration of Independence sets out Tuesdays as any more significant than Wednesday or any other weekday. The main purpose of Tuesday as election day in the US is that it is NOT SUNDAY.
In these days of 24/7, 7/7, year-round shopping, some Americans may wonder why voting on Sunday would be the Devil's Work? Well you might ask, since it appears that the seat of Christendom (or at least Catholicism), Rome, has been practicing voting on Sunday for ages. That's also the case for other mainly Christian countries, and even those where the state religion is Communism.
If the people who make money when you shop at their malls on Sundays can pocket their profits and still go to church with a clear conscience, how is it that the essential ingredient of democracy - voting - cannot be accomplished in America on Sundays, when most people have all day off? Maybe it's because the people who don't want you to vote - the same people who oppose "motor-voter" registration, who insist on 80 pound unwaxed paper to complete applications, and other more sinister voter suppression tactics - see Tuesday voting as a way of keeping the US turnout among the lowest in the world.
Americans tend to think that their voting systems (whether computerized or otherwise) are world class, but that's maybe because so little attention is paid to the mechanics of elections in other countries. Even countries where ballots are slipped into boxes - the norm in many extremely democratic countries - somehow manage to have very clean elections, where costs are a fraction of those in the United States.
Who ever decreed that the American Presidential elections begin years before the deed in November 2008? That every time you turn on CNN there's another debate? That "Meet the Press" and other Sunday news talk shows can only - boringly, repetitively - feature candidates or talking heads discussing candidates? And that this whole laborious process costs more than the GNP of many countries?
In the aftermath of the 2000 "Supreme Court" election, when George W. Bush squeaked into the White House, hanging chads weren't the only problem with American democracy. There were incidents of disinformation disseminated in certain communities (African American, Hispanic) to confuse potential voters into missing the election. In the 2004 Bush-Kerry race, Congressman John Conyers's book-length investigation into electoral malpractice went nowhere in terms of follow up, though Conyers is still vigilant on continuing electoral shenanigans. The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE, of which the US is a member) sent observers to the US in 2004 - the first time in the organization's history.
So next time American voters are forced to take off time from work to vote (will their bosses let them?) or arrive too late at a polling station after work on Tuesday, they should give a little thought to how it's done in the rest of the world. Making sure Americans can actually vote, and that their votes can be counted, would seem to be more important than scheduling "debates" every other week.