I don’t start worrying about the administration diddling the election until they start talking about postponing the election because of a heightened threat level (Red Alert! Red Alert!). Now that would send me out to man the barricades.
If we really must ask these questions, then let us also consider the wisdom of postponing national elections when say, the upper midwest from Rapid city to Detroit is buried under the fury of a blizzard, or Hurricanes threaten our southern coast. The outcome of elections frequently swings on environmental factors, yet there’s no movement underfoot to reschedule things for the first nice day in November. Why should the unpredictable actions of terrorists deserve a raincheck any more than bad weather?
Say there is an attack. Who determines the amount of severity needed to move the election. There are many level of damage that could be inflicted, from a biological attack on thousands of people, to a car bomb exploding that kills 5 people. Who makes the judgement? Seems like a whole lot of grey area there.
It’s an outstanding question[sup]1[/sup]. One might reasonably make the argument that a distinction should exist between things which want to disrupt elections (like Osama) and things which do not (like weather). I’d disagree with that – I’d say that as long as we’re going through the exercise let’s do it in a way that maximizes peoples’ right to vote whatever the circumstances.
Which leads to Club 33’s excellent question of how much stuff (terroristic or otherwise) is necessary before elections are postponed. To pick an extreme example on the one side, if Mr. Mike Average of St. Louis, MO and no one else is in a traffic jam caused by a sudden storm, tough titty. As you point out, environmental factors can swing elections even if they’re not supranormal – turnouts are smaller in the rain, for example. On the other hand, it wouldn’t seem right for Michigan to vote Democratic instead of Republican because the UP was shut down, or the other way because Detroit was closed, would it?
I’m thinking that maybe Eris and I have to abandon our preference for guaranteed single-day elections and that it should be a state decision[sup]2[/sup]. States, in turn, should have a process under which elections may be postponed which would include, say, the Governor declaring a State of Emergency (to pick up on your example, can you really have a fair election if the Governor has prohibited non-Emergency vehicles from travelling on highways?), and a ratification process which invoves, I dunno, the minority and majority leaders of the legislature and/or the state’s highest court.
As the alert levels are currently constructed, I’d join you. After all, 1010WINS reports today that apparently al Qaeda has targeted Wall St. specifically (and that Mayor Bloomberg is playing down the threat), but I’m still going to work tomorrow. Same would hold if I learned that al Qaeda were specifically targeting polling places in Greenwich Village. Fuck him, I ain’t abandoning my life or democracy on what he threatens or doesn’t.
I’m just thinking out loud here, but what if there were a panel of, say, the majority and minority leaders of each house of Congress and the three most senior members of the Supreme Court (without regard for who’s Chief Justice), that they’d have to find unanimously, and that they could only delay elections two weeks. A 7/8 majority of both houses of Congress could delay them another two weeks, and the electees would take their seats on the normal day regardless. Would that begin to satisfy your concerns (for the record, I don’t know if they’d satisfy mine – again, I’m just thinking out loud here)?
[sup]1[/sup]: An "outstanding question here being defined as “one to which I don’t have a good answer.” 
[sup]2[/sup]: Newsflash! Republican supports moving governmental decisions to the state and local level! Details after CSI.
I can’t put it any better than that. Certainly, if 9/11 had been right before a Presidential election, then perhaps postponing that election might have been advisable.
On the other hand, leaving the details to the administration that stole the last election seems inadvisable at best, insane at worst.
Cite? isn’t a “national” election really a number of “state” elections all occurring on the same day?
And your putz point?
Manhatten, I’d want the safeguards to be at least that strict: multiple, independant people outside the executive branch, not political appointees, would make the decision to postpone an election; very strict time limits would be needed, and these would lead to inevitable elections, whatever the circumstance. Anything less is a ticket to abuse.
On preview, I see that Wang Ka agrees with my earlier misgivings. I don’t want this administration – hell, any administration! – to be able to game the rules on whether the “weather” is suitable for an election today. The authority to make that call needs to have as much tension between the three branches of guvmint as possible, and more difficult than overriding a veto or perhaps even amending the Constitution.
Or, to put it another way: the easier it is to postpone an election, then the more important it is that safeguards are in place that make it extremely difficult or impossible to postpone it further, or to not set a mandated – and very, very difficult to override – date for the actual election once the postponement process has begun.
I’d like the commission to be as bipartisan as humanly possible. Heck, fill it with the Green and Libertarian parties. This committee should make the call. I think the maximum number of days must be laid out in advance, and I think anything over 7 is too many. All this should be laid out to the public well in advance.
I’m trying really hard not to wear Reynold’s headgear, but then things like this pop up:
They were able to vote, yet Homeland Security is still concerned that it was disrupted. Are they worried it will affect HOW people will vote, or whether they CAN vote? Reading the above makes me think the first. That’s the scary part of this.
The November election is also a time to elect Senators and Representatives.
Article I., Section 4., of the US Constitution.
Any possible changes of the current election schedule requires an Act of Congress, as well as changing the laws of the 50 States.
I think you’ve hit the nail on the head.
The concern is that terrorists could “disrupt the elections”. OK, so what does “disrupt” mean?
If a big event affects the outcome of the elections, well, so what? Assuming everyone that wanted to vote could do so, they all made a decision and voted their minds. Live with it.
Yes, I recall the situation in Spain, and to this day do not really understand the hand-wringing about Terrorists Controlling the Elections. No such thing happened: the Spanish (Spainish?) people went to the polls and voted thier minds. They’re not children, they made their decision as adults.
Whatever the climate on that day, regardless of the general political wind blowing whatever direction, the U.S. should darned well hold the vote on the proper day as long as the infrastructure to count the vote in still place.
In other words, nothing can happen before November in any case. That’s most likely a good thing – it’s comforting that the election-tinkering bar is so high.
However, Congress can pass one law to change the election date for Senators and Representatives, but has no authority to change the date of the presidential election, let alone any individual state-wide or local elections issues. Those fall to the individual States. And if Congress were to make such an attempt, we would have a clash between federal authority and state authority.
One remedy that is totally within the law: Absentee balloting.
If the dems in Palm Beach, LA, SF, NYC, etc., are worried, they should make a concerted effort to persuade their base to vote absentee. Conversely, the repubs in Dallas, Houston, Atlanta, Cheyenne, etc., should do the same if they’re worried about a well timed terrorist attack affecting the outcome in their precincts.
Any voter that is concerned that an attack may occur at their local voting place could instantly put their mind at ease by applying for an absentee ballot now. Any party committee or PAC concerned should start an advertising campaign ASAP.
What makes me raise an eyebrow is that this only seems to have merited discussion now, just four months before the election. The terrorist attack in Spain which appears to have prompted this debate occurred four months ago. Sure, Ridge reclaims that AQ may be preparing to disrupt our own elections, but the elections were always an obvious target.
Methinks this is merely a cover-your-ass consideration. Even if in the brief four months before the election, does anybody seriously think that regulations could be implemented that would stand up to the chaos of a 9/11-type attack?
Suppose a terror attack affects a small area in one swing state and that area was expected to go to Kerry. The state holds the election, and Bush wins. Not only will the Michael Moores of the world scream that Bush should have postponed the election, they will probably claim that he engineered the attack in the first place.
It makes a lot of sense to have contingency plans, as long as we’re not talking a delay of more than a few weeks-- that won’t affect the inauguration date anyway. The worst case would be if the attack came on election day, and many people had already voted. I don’t know what the hell to do then…
I predicted this last year when I said that the Bushites would cancel election, a suggestion that was dismissed as a paranoid fantasy. And yet here we are with the White House actively exploring the possibility of cancelling elections (which is what “postponing” would amount to). Like the torture memos from 2002, this is the preliminary stage in the further withering of our Constitutional rights. It’s only a short step from postponing the election to waiting for the right time to hold the election to convincing the public that elections are unnecessary.
So far, the Bush regime and its fellow travelers [ul]
[li] has committed outright fraud in order to start a war[/li][li]argued that it has the right to imprison suspects indefitely with no legal representation[/li][li]has employed torture routinely, including the deliberate torture of children to extract information from their parents[/li][li]Encouraged supporters to threaten anyone who speaks out against the government’s abuses[/li][li]equates criticism of policy with treason[/li][li]and now is investigating ways to fiddle with elections[/li][/ul]
At what point will Americans realize that the GOP is intent in turning this country into a one-party authoritarian state?
John, I think you missed the part of my post that said, “Assuming everyone that wanted to vote could do so” then we should hold the election regardless of the circumstances.
This move is simply another illustration of the intensity, on the part of this administration, of the ignorance of/contempt for the nature and history of the institutions they swore to uphold.
If this issue gains ground, you will hear a lot of utter busllshit in the next several days about how there is no precedent for the threat level we now face in this country. This is not true.
In 1815, the 14th Congress was sworn in.
The Democratic-Republicans had gained five seats in the House but lost two in the Senate, while their main rivals, the Federalists, lost three House seats but picked up two in the Senate.
Why does this matter? Because, like now, it was wartime, and just the previous August, *British troops had taken Washington and burned the Capitol AND the White House.
*
Apparently, our forebears couldn’t even bring themselves to cancel a MID-TERM election in the face of this disaster.
New York City elections in September 2001 were postponed because all of New York City was impacted in some way by the attacks. Terrorists are unlikely to bring about a situation where all of every state is affected by their actions. That’s part of the strength of our system. If Arnie says we’re not voting because of something that happened in Maryland three days earlier, I’ll be calling for his political hide.
And even if there were an attack, it wouldn’t be on election day anyway, if the terrorists’ previous actions can be seen as any kind of indicator. There will be time to accomodate those precincts affected by any disaster.
It’s our national duty to have elections, and we have already set a date. We stick with it.
I don’t understand why Bush is preparing to boast of having made great strides in the war on terrorism while at the same time we are considering preparing to postpone (cancel?) the upcoming Presidential election. If we are not safe enough to hold elections, then his vaunted victories in the war on terrorism ring hollow. For the first time in my life, I am prepared to accept conspiracy theories re the establishment of a Bush led totalitarian government. I would love to be convinced otherwise.
And it is still, rightly, dismissed as paranoid fantasy because… THERE ARE NO PLANS TO CANCEL THE ELECTION. As already pointed out, the last terror attack interrupted a NYC election and it was correctly postponed.
And there’s no telling which party would benefit politically from a few week postponement. I’d guess that a terror attack would give Bush an immediate, slight bump up in the polls that would degrade and tern negative pretty quickly.
So, tell us gobear what should we do if an attack similar to 9/11/01 happens the day before the election this year?