Election Day 2012 -- is 17 December.

That's when the Electoral College votes for president this election. The first Monday after the second Wednesday in December, in each state's capitol.  The Electoral College elects the president. We elect the electors. We do not directly elect the head of the executive branch of government. That's on purpose.  That purpose does not, unlike selecting Tuesday as voting day, derive from originally being mostly rural and without modern means of travel and communication (Monday to get to the poll, Tuesday to vote, Wednesday to get home, not disturbing religious observances, after harvest but before bad Winter weather). To know what that purpose of the Electoral College is, and why our nation's founders considered it one of the safeguards of our liberty and of our identity as a federal republic, is also, IMHO, to know why neither political party -- parties being neither mandated nor even assumed by the Constitution -- will really serve the vision according to which our country was constituted or greatly help or hinder in the ongoing working out of that vision over the long run.

Washington was dead set against political parties. The man, not the city! Ironic.