| Happy Thanksgiving! I will keep this short, but on this Thanksgiving Day, I wanted to let you know how thankful I am to have this opportunity to serve you, your neighbors, and this beautiful state. So THANK YOU! Speaking of our beautiful state, I have been getting emails about the possible new state flag design (shown below with our current state flag). Some people like it, and others do not. The legislature will vote on whether or not to adopt this new design for our flag in the 2023 legislative session. You can read about the process and reasons behind this design here. Please let me know how you would vote by clicking HERE to take a one question poll.   FACEBOOK FRIDAY LIVE THIS FRIDAY As the legislative session gets closer (it starts on January 17th and goes through March 3rd), I find myself getting busier and busier meeting and negotiating with stakeholders and getting bills drafted. I will be doing a Facebook Friday Live this coming Friday at 11:00 am to talk about some of these bills and other issues I have been asked about. I will post it so that you can either watch live Friday at 11:00 am or later by going to my Facebook page. INTERIM COMMITTEES Interim Committee meetings were last week. You can read brief summaries of what was discussed in each committee HERE and find links to agenda items, documents and presentations. On the last pages of this overview, you can find a list of all the bills that the committees have reviewed during this interim. VOLUNTEER OPPORTUNITIES If you are looking for a way to give back, United Way of Utah County has a wide range of volunteer opportunities, including Sub For Santa and Sub For Santa Plus. Conversely, if you or someone you know is in need, United Way is an amazing resource–just call 211 or go to their website. If you have any questions for me, please let me know. Have a wonderful weekend! I hope you get to spend it with people you love. Rep. Marsha Judkins P.S For those who didn’t think this email was quite long enough, here is something for you. |
| Why is Election Day the 1st Tuesday in November?I subscribe to an email that sends me interesting facts. One of these interesting facts answer this question about U.S. General Election Day, and I thought you might find it interesting, too. As implied by its name, Election Day is, well, a single day. That wasn’t always the case, however: States used to hold elections whenever they wanted within a 34-day period leading up to the first Wednesday in December. This ultimately created some issues, as you might imagine — early voting results ended up holding too much sway over late-deciding voters, for one thing. The current date was implemented by the Presidential Election Day Act of 1845, and federal elections now occur every two years on the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November. That may sound arbitrary at first, but the date was chosen quite deliberately. American society was much more agrarian in the mid-19th century than it is today, and it took a full day of traveling for many to reach their polling place. Church made weekends impractical, and Wednesday was market day for farmers, so Tuesday proved ideal. November, meanwhile, worked because weather was still fairly mild, and the harvest was complete by then. The current process isn’t perfect, of course. U.S. elections tend to have lower turnout than those of most other developed nations, and there have been calls for decades to make Election Day a national holiday. A 2018 poll found that 65% of Americans favored the idea, though there’s been little legislative movement on the proposal (no shock there!). Should it ever be put to a vote, you know when it will be held. |