It has been 75 years since the inauguration date was moved from March 4th to January 20th. I propose that the time has come to shorten the transition even further. We see currently that it is too long in a time of crisis.
Specifically, I suggest to move the election to the start of December.
I like the idea of starting each session of congress at the start of a calendar year (well, on January 3rd). Since we need them in case of any problems in determining the outcome of the election, this means that election day should be moved forward. If we do this also for midterm elections, this has the side benefit of having less (or no) lame duck sessions.
Note that the outcome of the 2000 election was finally determined on December 12, thirty-five days after the election. However, I would argue that first this was an exceptional case, and second, we would still have more than 35 days between the election and inauguration day in the new, accelerated timeline.
I suggest to schedule the election for the first Tuesday in December. If that is considered too close to Thanksgiving, the second Tuesday might be considered. For the rest of the process, I would set fixed dates: December 30th for the meeting of the electoral college, and January 6th for the official counting of the votes (actually I believe this date is already fixed?).
The timeline would look as follows for 2012.
| Current schedule | New schedule |
Election | Nov 6 | Dec 4 (Dec 11?) |
Meeting of electors | Dec 17 | Dec 30 |
Joint session of congress | Jan 6 | Jan 6 |
Inauguration day | Jan 20 | Jan 20 |
Of course, a possibly major disadvantage is that the time between the first primary and election day increases by a full month, thus essentially lengthening the entire process (which is already more than long enough!) by a month. To fix that, a rule could be considered mandating that no primary or caucus be held before April 1st.
What do you think?