But the mechanisms just aren’t there. When we had to postpone our primary on 9/11, Mayor Guiliani just… did it. No color of law, no legal precedent to back him up, just the unanimous opinion of New Yorkers that September 11 was a poor day on which to have an election.
I daresay that in an election of national impact, opinions would not be unanimous. ![:wink: :wink:](https://emoji.discourse-cdn.com/twitter/wink.png?v=10)
If anything, you’d think it would be the Democrats who are ahead of the curve on this issue, for two reasons. One, I’d think they’d more likely than Republicans to believe that the current state of the law is inadequate to handle election difficulties (not that the situations wouldn’t be reversed if Vice President Gore had prevailed in the Florida difficulties, of course).
The other reason is who’s most likely to lose if an election goes forward in the wake of an attack. Now, I don’t have the ability to predict who’d benefit if there were an attack on, say, October 30th and the election could reasonably be held (albeit under sad circumstances) on schedule. But if there’s an attack actually on election day… Well, no offense to my red-state fellow-travellers who think Osama has his eye on the Cheyannne State Fairgrounds, but he doesn’t. What little evidence we have is that foreign terrorists like high-impact target which are famous overseas. Places like the World Trade Center, the Brooklyn Bridge, the Golden Gate Bridge. Places which are inhabited by, well, Democrats.
People are all paranoid that Bush might call off an election in the face of a terrorist attack. Imagine the alternative – that he doesn’t. Imagine that New York and California both “vote” Republican because the Democratic voters in each state’s largest cities are too busy evacuating a poison gas cloud (or whatever) to vote on the appointed day. The very same people who are afraid that Bush might postpone elections would be furious that he didn’t.
No, it makes absolute sense to ask these questions, even if I fear the answers will come too late to benefit us (such as it is) in the '04 elections. There should be asked similar questions about natural disasters – Would it be fair for a late-season hurricane to deprive Carolinians of their voice in the election, etc. When you think about it, whether it’s terrorism or something else, we’ve been pretty darn lucky so far in terms of not having elections disrupted by things beyond our control.