Both Newsweek and CNN are reporting that the Department of Homeland Security has asked for legal opinions about delaying the November election if there is a terrorist attack.
Newsweek reported that Soaries [chair of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission] expressed concern that no federal agency had the authority to postpone an election and asked Ridge to ask Congress to give his commission such power.
This type of talk really scares me. The reason no federal agency has that power, is to make sure that there are elections. It is to make sure that we can’t have a dictatorship.
Yes, terrorists can blow stuff up and possibly sway voters. But guess what, better that then give anyone the thought that elections can be delayed due to an “emergency.” While I don’t really think that the Bush administration would manufacture some reason to push back elections, I don’t want any kind of precident set for the future. This is the kind of thing that could snowball in 50-60 years into disaster. Have we learned nothing from watching history?
July 12th, 2004 at 10:20 am
I hesitated posting about this over the weekend, in part because it wasn’t big news yet. A few blogs had picked it up but it wasn’t front page news on CNN until yesterday or this morning.
The thing that bugs me, of course, is that this country is absolutely freaking huge… it seems extraordinarily unlikely that we’d have to do this in more than one or two states. Think September 11th… Aside from New York and Washington D.C./Virginia, who else couldn’t go to work the next morning? Boston folks, maybe, too.
I think that there is a legitimate concern here, but I also think this administration has a knack for insuring their own survival. They don’t want what happened in Spain happening here (attack and incumbent gets booted). Never mind that an attack would most likely boost the incumbent here because of the immediate “patriotic” reaction that would happen.
Then again, we had a non-specific terror warning just letting us all know that Homeland security is still at work the day after Kerry announced his VP pick, pushing the VP announcement off the front page at CNN, MSNBC, etc. That wasn’t politically motivated at all….
July 12th, 2004 at 10:50 am
The part that I don’t understand is, don’t we not cancel elections for war? If we don’t cancel elections for war, why would we cancel under the threat of terrorism?
July 12th, 2004 at 11:57 am
well, the difference is that we’ve never had major battles inside the U.S. aside from the Civil War (and maybe the War of 1812?). I don’t know what the election situation was in the Civil War (anyone know?), but I can see a reason for htis.
Imagine for a second (and only for a sec, as this is sorta ugly) that a terrorist attack was carried out in the top 20 metropolitan areas in the U.S. all at once, that it was a chem or bio attack that required people to stay home, and that there were many fatalities. Too many people would be disenfranchised by the elections moving forward.
Even more problematic, the top 20 metro centers are, by their very nature, in the 10 or 12 states that have the most electoral college votes…
There’s probably nothing that is wrong with looking into this, but I’m not sure it should be delegated down to an agency, and probably shouldn’t be an executive branch decision alone… Maybe a committee of the speaker, majority and minority leaders of Congress, the chief justice, and the pres or selected designee of the pres (head of that agency, for example)? Just tossing out ideas.
July 12th, 2004 at 11:58 am
And, Bram, as to your last line, the answer is “NO.”
July 13th, 2004 at 12:20 pm
I wouldn’t put MUCH past this current administration. I’d easily believe that they’d try to postpone an election. Afterall, they did “fix” the last one.