Pertinent questions:
Who decides that the elections are postponed or cancelled?
Who decides when elections can be resumed?
The party in power? A bipartisan committee? An appointed political lackey?
What if the President (and, by the way, the CIC with all the armed forces at his command) decides that, goddamnit, it’s just not safe yet to hold said elections?
I’m on the ramparts with the rest of the radicals. Fuck this. Fuck this with a large stump.
Mtgman
Well, sure, Dallas! Talk about your focus for mincing pinko fellow-travelers and Commie dupes! Pity you had not my advantages, being raised in Waco, as Molly Ivins calls, the “Vatican of the Baptists”…
But you bring up an interesting historical sidelight. Twas indeed a time when the “organic” movement was largely the creature of the Right. “Precious bodily fluids”, and all that.
Eh, we were never part of a “movement”. Just continuing the family traditions as best we could in the concrete jungle. My father was raised on a farm in Virginia. My grandmother was raised on a farm as well. She moved to the city and ran a grocery store in downtown Dallas during the time my mother was growing up, but after my mom and dad hooked up they spent a few years in the valley and just brought a bit of the farm back to the city. Twasn’t nothin’ like the “organic movement” where city folk tried to be farmers, was more akin to farmers tryin’ to be city folk. Wasn’t out of some fear of our purity of essence being comprimised, just that ol’ fashioned “rugged individualism” that carried my grandma through the great depression and was still strongly felt when my father was growing up in the 40’s.
Enjoy,
Steven
I have to agree with this. In such a situation, I would scrambling, trying to find my loved ones, not thinking about making it to the polls. I think hundreds of thousands of people would be doing the same.
I agree that cancelling an election is out of the question. But what is the harm of postponing it a week or two in the event of a disaster? Or not counting the results until that area hit by the distaster has a chance to actually cast their votes?
spooje, as…um, um, um…I’m sorry, I’m frantically searching through the “serious” posts to this thread…somebody, dammit, I know I wasn’t hallucinating…As somebody said earlier, we are not talking about postponement/cancellation of a local election. We’re talking about a national election. Why does it make sense to cancel a general election for a terrorist “threat” (and please define) aimed at one specific spot? And, explain how long, exactly, the postponement is for. “Til further notice” just for some reason makes all the hair on the back of my neck stand up, and gets me to thinking “I should be visiting the fam in Italy…”
Okay, and on actually reading your post completely…again, yes I can see where cancelling the election in the place of the attack would be a good idea. But for the whole country? Isn’t that just letting the terrorists win? Which is what we’re supposed to be fighting against, right?
The problem with postponing a national election in one place while the election goes on in other places is that in the interest of fairness you would have to keep a lid on any kind of exit polling or just about any other kind of polling that would influence the voting in the place that had to postpone. That would be impossible.
I usually wear a blue one. That makes me a Blood, not a Crip, right?
Along the same lines, if we’re going to pour boiling oil down from the barricades, let’s make sure it’s pure canola oil and not rendered lard or other such evil stuff. Sure, it’s fun to try to burn people alive with boiling oil, but then you have to explain to somebody’s wife why his triglyceride level went through the roof …
Heh. Can you believe I actually had to look it up? What a lame ass resistance fighter I am. :smack: Crips are blue, Bloods are red.
Mack, I’m sorry, I understand what you’re saying, but calling off elections in ALL parts of the country indefinitely is not an acceptable response to a terrorist threat.
But my blood is blue. I guess I’m dead if I go to Oakland.
The problem with postponing elections is not in the postponement itself. It is in the decision-making process, and the owners thereof, surrounding how to postpone it, what grounds are sufficient for a postponement, and what the guidelines/timelines are for re-scheduling one. The idea seems fine, it is the implementation that causes the sticky wicket. Doubly so because we can’t predict the type of event we’d be responding to. 9/11 was highly localized(on a national scale) and postponing counting results, leaving the polls open, while the city recovers a bit would probably work fine(barring exit poll concerns and other reasonable objections). A widespread attack(pipebombs in mailboxes, anthrax letters, etc.) would disrupt the network of voters enough to cause a re-scheduling. But who decides when it has been enough time?
Enjoy,
Steven
Which of our beautiful female Dopers wants to hang out a boob and play Liberty?
Well, the Constitution holds that the presidential election must happen on a single day, and if I’m not mistaken specifies the date. So it couldn’t go through without an amendment, which is etremely unlikely to happen at all and well nigh impossible before the election.
For those who are wondering what Cervaise is talking about -
OK. Vegetarians on this end of the barricade, carnivores on that end.
How are those T-sirts coming?
Trying to drag this thread back to seriousness.
God I love the way that barricade is turning out though.
As far as I can tell, the only way the election could be cancelled would be if Bush proclaimed martial law which suspends the constitution.
Just how would he go about doing that?
Which is why it makes sense to decide these things, as best can be done under various scenarios, in advance, not on the afternoon of an election day. Sheesh!
See, we got lucky. Our mayor was term-limited out, there were no statewide offices up for grabs and there was near-unanimous agreement that having an election that day was a poor idea anyway.
Imagine the following: Rudy’s not term limited and is running for a third term. He’s not doing particularly well in the polls (the G-man wasn’t nearly as popular here on 9/10 as we was on 9/12 or as he became nationally). The polls are open for a couple hours and all of a sudden 9/11 happens.
He cancels elections. No authority or anything, he just does it. Tris on the last page, apparently having drawn the good luck to be a precinct officer in a place where he is not physically choking on the vaporized remains of his loved ones, is really upset about this. So are the other candidates for mayor.
When the polls reopen in a month, the mayor wins in a huge landslide. Is that fair? I don’t have a good answer. On the one hand, yeah, the polls had to be closed if for no other reason that every police officer in the city was otherwise occupied. On the other hand, he closed the polls unilaterally, without color of law, and directly benefitted from his decision.
What if it had been a state-wide or national election? Are New Yorkers to be denied a voice because of the attacks? That really would be an example of the terrorists winning, no?
Doesn’t it make a teensy bit more sense to think about this in advance? Maybe the right answer is that only a state’s highest court can postpone an election. OK, then codify it. Some people go batshit when the press calls east-coast election results before west-coast polls close. Does California get to vote on a whole separate day with full knowledge of how the rest of the country voted just because they want to give a voice to the San Franciscans devasted by the election-day quake? Maybe, maybe not. Right now, no one knows. And there’s no process to decide. I think there ought to be that process. I don’t have the answers, but I’m sure glad someone has the good sense to ask the questions.
If an election is cancelled – really cancelled – I’m there too. And like some of the others in this thread, I have guns. Nor do I need any Krispy Kreme shit – the powdered meals and water purifying tablets in my survival kit will do just fine, thanks.
If an election is merely postponed because I and others in my city were attacked, I will fire on the ramparts with those very same guns at the people who are opposing my rights for the “principal” of having an election on a Tuesday instead of a Friday.
Dude, you just described almost every national election I’ve ever voted in. By the time the polls open out here in California, the elections almost always has been settled one way or the other by the central and Eastern states.
Let it hereforth be established that election day is November 2. That contradicts what I said how? Regardless, I’ll be busy rigging election machines and strong-arming Democrats on November 1st and 2nd, so late October was mentioned since that will be last time I will be able to make fun of the ‘loyal opposition’ until after the W victory party.
Awesome, dude. Freakin’ awesome.
The Justice Lords I believe. I’d rather stay on the good side of angry Superman.
-Wolfian, Cartoon Network junkie
In all seriousness I have no problem with postponing the elections, but canceling them is extreme. I’m not wearing a tin foil hat yet, but thank you keeping us informed of this, choie.
I’m a little out of touch with the civilized world here in East Texas. What is this incredible force y’all are in debate over. Is it some kind of Klan? Members of a new political party perhaps?
The Krispy Kreme Klan…? Hmmm, doesn’t sound all that tough. But you never know. The deadliest venom is often found in alluring places.