"" Why isn't Election Day a national holiday in the United States? What other options are there? yinyang/Getty Images In 2016, the United States ranked 26th in the world in voter participation, with only 56 percent of eligible voters casting ballots in the 2016 presidential election. That's better than the 2012 election's participation rate of 53.6 percent but embarrassingly low participation compared to Sweden's 87 percent participation rate, and barely above the voting rate in former Soviet republics such as Slovenia, which don't have a centuries-old tradition of democracy. Even though 2020 is shaping up to be a year of higher-than-normal voter turnout in the U.S., experts are predicting about 65 percent turnout, certainly nothing like 80 percent. So what's up with that? What motivates people to either vote or abstain from doing so? Some simply don't like the candidates running in a given year, prefer to do something else that day, or else somehow forget that there's an … [Read more...] about Why Do Americans Vote on a Tuesday?