[li] The President cannot decree that the elections are delayed. Congress sets the date of the election (it’s not hard-coded into the Constitution). Congress could pass emergency legislation postponing the election.[/li]
[li] Good luck with that – Politically, logistically, and possibly legally.[/li][/QUOTE]
Right. More or less the entire House and at least a third of the Senate will be campaigning at that time, so the odds of everyone returning to Washington and agreeing on a solution on short notice is not great.
If some state had a natural disaster and held their election a week later (or any time before the electoral college actually voted), I suspect that they would proceed as usual and could the electoral votes. I’m sure there would be lots of complaining by Republicans if it were New York, for example, or Democrats if it were Texas if those electoral votes were sufficient to swing the election. However, I think fairness would win out and they’d say counting the votes would be the right thing to do.
The harder question is this one. Suppose Sandy had hit a week later and greater New York City was essentially closed so that there was no way those 8 million people couldn’t vote. (Yes I realize not all 8 million are eligible, but I’m com;paring it to the state population). I’d imagine it would be quite possible that the remaining 11 million residents of New York state would give a Republican majority. Since NY is not by any stretch of the imagination considered a swing state this year, I’d think it would be less fair to have this scenario than some kind of postponement.
As a WAG, I’d guess that non-voting due to natural disasters is more likely to adversely affect the Democratic Party than the Republican because the kinds of natural disasters that would affect voting would seem to be localized ones and those would tend to have more impact on a city than a rural area and cities tend to be more liberal than their state. That is not to say there aren’t Republican cities, but those tend to be in red states. I can’t think of any state in which the loss of a city’s vote would tend to shift the state vote Democratic.
ETA: Early voting is legal even though we have a specified election day. It’s just possible, though unlikely, that late voting is authorized.
It appears that the law in question says if a state “has failed to make a choice on the day prescribed by law, the electors may be appointed on a subsequent day in such a manner as the legislature of such State may direct.”
So it would appear that the state legislature could, on its own volition, probably postpone the election. They could of course also vote in the electors themselves, as the FL legislature was ready to do in 2000, but that, I’m sure, would lead to many protests.
I was just about to formulate a catchy topic-title and OP about hurricanes on Election Day, but was referred to this old thread, which may well be worth reviewing and reviving. I tend to get a kick out of going to the community hall and voting in person on The Day, but the potential for disaster weather AND electoral hi-jinks makes me want to vote early and/or remotely.
I was involved in such a situation some years ago.
There was a special election called in an urban district, to fill a vacancy, scheduled for mid-January in Minnesota.
And guess what – we had a blizzard the night before, with several inches of snow. At 7am, when the polls opened, still very cold, the snow had mostly stopped, but high winds were still blowing snow around, and most streets had a foot or more of snow blocking them.
Most of the polling places were nearly snowed in. We had to make an emergency call to the Mayor to get snowplows diverted to open up polling places. (Many were in park buildings or churches, which were not high priority for snow emergency plowing. Also the head of the Construction Unions got some of their members to use their heavy machinery to make a pass thru the polling place to open the driveways.)
In Minnesota, we have ‘curbside voting’, where you can drive to the polling place, 2 election judges (from different parties) bring a ballot out to the car, you fill it in, and then they take it back inside and feed it to the tally machine. That got used much more than normal that day, and some election judges got pretty cold.
But the election went on, just as scheduled.
And the weather did have consequences for the voting. Turnout was lower than normal, even for a special election. It was especially low among elderly voters. And that probably changed the results. One candidate had heavy support from seniors, and was predicted to win. But he was beaten by the other candidate.
This loophole was closed by the Electoral Count Reform Act of 2022 — which was admittedly 10 years in the future when you wrote this. Now, the voting period may be extended, but only as specified by laws passed by the state legislature before the election. And the only way to deal with a force majeure event interfering with an election is to extend the voting period; it’s no longer legal for state legislators to step in and choose the electors themselves.
I don’t understand this post. IIRC in 2008 George W was president, even until January 2009. Dealing with the election was neither candidate’s purview. From my recollection of the 2008 period, after the election president-elect Obama deliberately refrained from any comments about his plans, essentially saying America had only one president at the time and mixed messages would not be helpful.
There was an article on today’s Raleigh News & Observer (which of course I can’t find online) about how the damage caused by Helene in western North Carolina could affect the upcoming election, between transportation disruptions making it difficult or impossible for voters to get to the polling places, whether the post office will be able to collect or deliver mail-in ballots, or whether polling places will even be able to be open. This could also result in claims of how valid the election results would be, with NC being a swing state, and (if I’m remembering the article correctly) the fact that much of that area tends to vote Republican.
If I’d taken the time to think about this, I would have said that if we had county-level election returns from 4 years ago, we could in fact say which party will be hurt the most by Helene. I don’t have those, but I’m sure someone out there does.
Most of those counties are rural, while Asheville is urban, so you can’t go by the number
of counties. Someone has to add up the 2020 votes for those 25 counties and see whether Harris or Trump is likely to be hurt more by the storm. I’m sure someone has already done this.
As @MikeS posted above, federal law was amended in 2022 to provide that states may “modify the period of voting as necessitated by force majeure events that are extraordinary and catastrophic, as provided under laws of the state” enacted prior to Election Day. So states may only modify (i.e. extend) the period of voting due to a natural disaster – state legislatures are not permitted to appoint electors as was permissible under previous statutes.