Postponing the Election

[billroper]

A friend of mine posted this article to a mailing list that I'm on, noting that he thought that legislation allowing the government to postpone an election in case of, say, a terrorist attack would be a bad idea.

Now, I agree that it could be a bad idea, but that would depend on what the actual implementation was.

My friend was absolutely correct when he said that this sounds like a terrible idea, but let me paint a scenario for you:

On the morning of the election, terrorists carry out an attack on Manhattan that's on the scale of 9/11. Chaos reigns in the NYC area and essentially no one from the urban area is able to get to the polls and vote. Upstate New York is largely unaffected (directly), as is the rest of the nation.

Everyone who does vote goes out and votes in exactly the way they had intended to prior to the attack, since everyone had their mind made up anyway. But without the NYC area vote, upstate New York carries the day for Bush and the Republicans who collect the state's electoral votes and win over Kerry and the Democrats in a race that's as close as the 2000 election.

We then hear four years of complaining about how Bush cheated and stole the election by not postponing the election given the state of emergency in NYC. (Mind you, he would have had no authority to do so.)

It might be a very good idea to postpone the elections, depending on exactly what happened and who gets to make the call. If, for instance, an election could be postponed by the unanimous concurrence of the President, the Vice-President, the Speaker of the House, the House Minority Leader, and the Majority and Minority leaders of the Senate (or as many of them as are alive) in the event of a terrorist attack (or perhaps a power outage like we had that blacked out much of the Northeast recently -- *oops* the fancy electronic voting machines aren't working), that might be a good thing.

Wouldn't you agree?

Comments

[beamjockey.livejournal.com]

To my mind, the power to postpone the election doesn't belong in Federal hands. That it lies elsewhere is (a small) part of our protection against tyranny.

[billroper]

You may well be right about the first, but are you right about the second? Does a state have the right to postpone a Federal election so that it doesn't fall on the Federal Election Day?

[beamjockey.livejournal.com]

I don't know.

The states have the responsibility for administering the elections, so naively I'd imagine that someone at the state level would have the power to postpone an election.

I imagine, non-naively, that we'll have an opportunity to learn more facts about this as the "Big Federal Off Switch" issue bubbles up into a major story. It's just hit the Top Stories box on Google News with a cluster of 105 hits; there are 324 hits on "Soaries," most of them appearing in the past day or two. Hang on.

[billroper]

It's certainly not clear right now (see sdorn's post above), but you're right about the likelihood of it being clear pretty soon... :)

[jrittenhouse.livejournal.com]

That reminds me; Bill H, who's your congresscritter? If it's the same as ours, I need to vote for you in November for that job. Failing that, I'm voting the Marmot Party.

[billroper]

And, as you predicted, here's today's article on the subject from the Chicago Tribune:

Postpone a Federal election?

It appears that Congress sets the date of the Federal election. It doesn't appear that a state can postpone an election so that it doesn't occur on the specified day. (But the article is not entirely clear on the subject.)