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How Time Zones Affect the Election
Imagine yourself on the evening of November 4th. It is the day of the presidential election. Will the voters elect Democrats Barak Obama and Joe Biden or Republicans John McCain and Sarah Palin? The future of the country is going to be decided tonight and so far with all polls closed the race for the Whitehouse is too close to call. You are excited but exhausted and frustrated. If you live on the East Coast you can plan on being exhausted from waiting until well past midnight to hear the final returns. Those on living on the west coast may be frustrated by voting when votes have already been tabulated in the east, asking themselves, “Will my vote count?”  The three hour time difference between the Eastern and Pacific time zones in Canada creates an even more serious problem. Because of the much higher proportion of the population in Canada that live in the Eastern Time Zone, federal elections there are often decided long before the polls even close in the west. Do you have to resign yourself to exhaustion or frustration because of an arbitrary decision made 124 years ago that divided the contiguous USA into four and Canada into six standardized time zones? There IS a simpler way to divide the continent into more sensible time zone divisions. The Presidential Election could start on the east coast one half hour later and end on the West Coast one half hour earlier, reducing the time differential between the Eastern and Pacific time zones from three hours to two and giving those 80% of folks living in the Eastern and Central time zones an extra hour of sleep. On election night, the time zone system in effect today unnecessarily inconveniences folks on both sides of the continent and in both countries, especially westerners whether Americans or Canadians This helps to make the phrase, western alienation more than just a slogan This fall with federal elections taking place in both countries and with all political parties in Canada and the USA taking up the theme of effecting change, it is time for a change-a change in the way that North Americans, from Alaska through Canada, the contiguous USA to Mexico observe time. This website is dedicated to the concept of reducing North American Time Zones by one complete Zone in a manner that will bring all three countries closer together, from east to west and from north to south. Time for a change-Time to change our time zones! Distribution of US Population by Time Zone:Eastern......................47.0%Central......................32.9% Mountain..................5.4% Pacific.....................14.1% Alaska and Hawaii.....0.6 % Distribution of Canadian Population by Time ZoneNewfoundland……..1.6 %Atlantic………….....5.6% Eastern……………62.5% Central…………......6.7% Mountain…………10.5% Pacific……………13.2% How North America can increase its productivity and its security by revising its time zonesReduce the number of time zones from six to fiveIt's time to change our clocks but not simply in the usual fashion of "spring forward" and "fall back" to accommodate Daylight Saving Time (DST). We need to redefine the way that North Americans observe time relative to Universal Coordinated Time (UTC). Our time zones are relics of a bygone era that predates electrical lighting, high-speed Internet connections, trans-continental air travel, the global economy and large-scale terrorist threats to national security. The time has come for North America to modernize the way we keep time across the Continent by reducing the number of time zones by one. An extensive range of benefits would accrue from the elimination of only one time zone. It is important to bolster North America's trade and commerce by coordinating time changes among the NAFTA nations in order to harmonize and optimize our financial, industrial, transportation, and communication links. This could well be the most cost-effective decision taken by governments since the adoption of Standard Time. Certainly, when compared to the modest payback from the disruption caused twice annually by DST, consolidating our time zones will produce very significant economic, but of course, as yet unmeasured benefits. The elegance of this proposal is that all these gains can be reaped from a modest change of only 30 minutes-less of a change than what we experience annually under the current practice of moving clocks an entire hour to accommodate DST. We simply need to move our clocks ahead one half hour in the west and back one half hour in the rest of the country. I invite you to study the material offered on this site and offer your opinion on the chat page. I welcome discussion and constructive criticism.
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