National elections is legally a vacation day. The government wants its citizens to participate in elections, and it encourages the people to do so by giving them a vacation day. Some people take the vacation day and still don't go vote, but most people don't really have a good excuse to not vote. Some choose not to because they don't like the options of whom to vote for, but some just prefer to spend the day on the beach or in the mall or doing whatever.
We are now on the way to getting another legal vacation day every 5 years or so.
Interior Minister Gideon Saar has proposed a law by which the day of municipal elections will officially be a legal vacation day. The proposal has now passed its initial reading in the ministerial legislative committee, and now has to be prepared for further voting in the Knesset.
Saar says that making it a legal vacation will increase the voter turnout, which has consistently decreased in recent years. Saar believes that municipal elections are no less important than national elections, and turning it into a vacation day will make it easier for people to actualize their democratic right to vote.
I agree and applaud the move. We can all use more legal vacation days. The more the merrier. And if they speed up the legislation, perhaps we in Bet Shemesh might already be able to benefit from this law quickly, if the courts will decide to call for new municipal elections due to fraud in the original edition of elections!
of course the Haredi media sees this as something bad and harmful to the haredim. The headline on Kikar's article about this proposal reads "Blow to the Haredim...".. and explains that the haredi community and haredi political parties has benefited from municipal elections being a work day, thus causing many non-haredim to not bother going to vote.
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