By Equal Voice Action

With Election Day less than a week away, ElectionDay.org and Make Time To Vote are calling for companies across the nation to join their nonpartisan efforts to make sure all employees have time to participate in our country’s electoral process.

As detailed by ElectionDay.org, the United States has one of the lowest voter participation rates in the developed world, as low as 36.4 percent in the last midterm elections. According to a comprehensive study from the Pew Research Center, the single most common reason that nonvoters gave, and have given for decades, was that they simply did not have time to vote due to work or school conflicts. Currently, there is no federal law that governs time off to vote, and only twenty-three states require paid time off to vote.

To change this paradigm, ElectionDay.org and Make Time To Vote are bringing together a diverse coalition of companies in an effort to increase voter participation in Election 2018.

These business-led, nonpartisan campaigns currently include more than 300 committed companies, including: Anytime Fitness, Burton, Farmers Insurance, Kaiser Permanente, Levi Strauss & Co., Nordstrom, Patagonia, Priceline, Sonos, Timberland, and Walmart.

Companies that have joined the campaign have pledged their commitment to driving voter participation in a variety of ways, such as creating a full company holiday, offering paid time off, shortening office hours, allowing employees to work from home, scheduling a no-meetings workday, and providing resources for mail-in ballots and early voting.  

ElectionDay.org and Make Time to Vote invite CEOs from companies across the country to join the effort and make sure that employees have the proper time to vote. Click here and here to see the full lists of participating companies, and join the growing group of committed companies by clicking here and here.

Interested in learning about the specific laws in your state about time off to vote? Click here.

ElectionDay.org is a business-led official project of Vote.org, which is a 501(c)(3) registered non-profit organization. 

Make Time to Vote is a nonpartisan campaign made up of a diverse coalition of companies that are coming together to increase voter participation in the midterm elections.