>one of the big reasons people want election day to be a holiday so that young working people can get to the polls.

To be blunt, they want a day off for (mostly white) middle class office workers. There are definitely access issues for voting but it's easy enough to fix without a holiday that will still leave people working in retail, food service, hospitality and plenty of other industries without help.

• Make early / mail voting an available option with a range of times/days and adequate locations. Promote the fuck out of it because I'd bet a lot of people in Rhode Island don't realize they've been able to vote for a week.
• In denser urban populations, provide adequate staff, facilities, and equipment for voting. Fund elections properly. Even with one-day voting, it's a failure of our society that you have insanely long lines that always seem to occur in heavily non-white districts in cities. Have backup equipment for everything. Test shit. Staff properly. The lines never needed to be that long.
• Penalties for employers who actively try to deny their employees from voting. The longer the early voting window, the less you need this.

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I'll happily accept a day off and all but if you want to actually solve the problem? Election Day as a holiday doesn't do the job nearly as well.

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> I also have to admit that progressives I feel undermine the process of trying to engage young voters with the "mainstream dems are just as bad as republicans" noise which creates a disaffected voting bloc. How many posts revolve around "don't vote for mainstream dems because it rewards the party that didn't choose our specific candidates". Most importantly for the current state of our country I want to point out the large volume of the "protest vote for Bernie Sanders and/or don't vote at all" in 2016.

1000000% agreed. That hasn't helped.