Tuesday is election day, and we hope that the turnout will be high. Early signs indicate that it will be held in Virginia. Democrat Terry McAuliffe and Republican Glenn Youngin are running side by side in the governorship race, which is seen as a weather vane in mid-2022 (wrongly, my colleague Alec Sheppard argued).

In recent years, the vote issue has sparked heated debate, but a mild apolitical remedy—not related to this year’s election but highly relevant in most years—deserves more attention. The remedy I think of is modest, because its impact on voter turnout is roughly equal to whether there is a governor campaign on the ballot — that is, it is not earth-shattering, but sufficient to cause concern. (The voter turnout rate in the governor election is usually higher than that in the primary or local elections, but lower than that in the presidential election.) The remedy I propose is non-political, because it is not clear whether the Democrats or Republicans will benefit more, although I dishonestly admit that the majority of the vote expansion is in favor of the Democratic Party, at least moderately. This is why the Republican Party is a party that suppresses voters.

The remedial measures are related to daylight saving time, which will end this year at 2 a.m. on Sunday, November 7.

Please rest assured that I will not let you fall into a fiercely divided question about whether the United States should implement daylight saving time throughout the year, as we did from 1973 to 1975, or eliminate daylight saving time altogether. Instead, I propose to move the conversion of standard time from the first Sunday in November back to the last Sunday in October, which had existed for 30 years before 2007.

This change was promulgated as part of the Energy Policy Act of 2005, with the idea that adding a week of daylight saving time can save energy. But people have not been clear whether daylight saving time can actually save energy. The real reason for extending DST is that the candy lobby wants it. Like my college classmate Michael Downing (Michael Downing), he was a novelist and lecturer at Tufts University. He died prematurely in February this year. "Crazy" explains that an extra week of daylight in the evening means an extra hour of trick-or-treating during the day of Halloween. Jiaqing!

You would think that one extra week in the late afternoon, by converting it into an extra hour for daytime voting, would increase the turnout rate. But according to a 2014 paper by Iowa State University political scientist Robert Urbatsch, this is not the case. It's not that if election day falls to standard time within two days after the transition-it's not this year, but it does most of the time-then some few people will feel too rough coming from the alarm clock to the polling station one hour later than usual. *

Time shift really messes people's minds. I can feel it better in spring. I wake up in a slight panic on the second Sunday of March every year. I am already one hour behind. On the first Sunday of November each year, I am usually happy to add an hour to my day. But as Fats Domino pointed out, no one likes Mondays, and it can be disorienting to wake you up when your alarm clock feels like 8 o'clock in the morning but is actually 7 o'clock. Because our circadian rhythm takes up to a week to adjust, Tuesday is also a bit confusing. Cognition, motor skills, and decision-making are all impaired. There are records showing that in the first few days after the transition to standard time, there were more traffic accidents (hard cheese for those who trick or treat without sugar), more workplace accidents, more stock market volatility, and Maybe more heart attacks.

Again, these disasters will not come to the election on Tuesday, because November this year started on Monday. In the year that November begins on Monday, the switch to standard time will be postponed five days after the election. For better or worse, this year's potential voters will be more sober than in previous years.

However, November has not started on Monday since 2010, and will not start again on Monday until 2027. Back on the last Sunday in October, the situation is the opposite: Election Day arrives 48 hours after the circadian rhythm and will only be interrupted when November starts on Monday, as happened in 1999, 2004 and 2010 (when it did not It is important again, because daylight saving time has been postponed).

The peculiarities of the Gregorian calendar allow Urbatsch to compare the turnout rate when the election is held two days after the standard time shift (that is, most years) with the turnout rate five days before the election (this year, but not most years). He found that the turnout rate in years like this was 2.63% higher. In contrast, the voter turnout for the Senate election increased by 1.04%, the voter turnout for the governor election increased by 2.77%, and the presidential election voter turnout increased by 15.85%. (Urbatsch's calculation excludes Indiana, which spans the eastern and central time zones, so the relationship with time is very complicated.)

Considering that Biden voters are almost twice as likely to vote by mail as Trump voters, perhaps you think that getting more people to participate in the polls will help Donald Trump in 2016. But that's because Trump told his voters very stupidly not to vote by mail, and most of them didn't. This may make Trump lose his election opportunity, because voters over the age of 65-one of Trump's key electoral districts-vote mainly by mail. They chose Trump 52-47%. If Trump supports voting by mail, the gap will be even greater.

Of course, the existence of partisanship in either way is ultimately irrelevant. The more people who vote, the better. If we switch standard time back to the last Sunday in October, more people will vote. Alternatively, we can maintain daylight saving time or cancel daylight saving time and use standard time throughout the year. But I don't want to start that battle again.

* This article initially misreported the direction of the time switch. In addition, the earlier version of this article gave the percentage of eligible voters, and the relevant statistics are the percentage of the voting age population.

Timothy Noah is a contributing writer for the New Republic and the author of The Great Divergence: America's Growing Inequality Crisis and What We Can Do.