Postponing elections

[mmcirvin]

Jack Balkin has a sane take on the legal issues involved in the government's recent trial balloon concerning contingency postponement of the election.

The practical and logical issues he cites toward the end are all well-expressed, but I have to believe he's trying his hardest to sound calm and measured here. My immediate reaction is that the whole thing is the biggest and most dangerous load of horseshit I've heard from the administration in some time, and that's saying something. We've gone through the burning of Washington, the Civil War, the Spanish flu and many close approaches to global nuclear war without, as far as I know, messing with the national elections as a result or even seriously considering it. I don't see how terrorist attacks are supposed to be different, unless we want to go out of our way to show special cravenness to the bad guys.

As one of his commenters mentions, there was an election scheduled in New York City on Sept. 11, 2001, and it was postponed locally, in a sensible manner; such measures could be applied on a piecemeal basis even for the presidential election, as Balkin explains. There is no need to call or postpone the election nationally unless you're up to no good.

Comments

[pootrootbeer.livejournal.com]

There's a reason why several months elapse between a national election and an inauguration. The fall of 2000 may have been the best example of why this is so.

Should there be terrorist attacks in the United States on Election Day 2004, the votes in the affected states should be nullified and a re-vote should occur a few days or weeks later; ballots in states that did not suffer attacks should stand as originally cast.

I see no legitimate reason for the inauguration of the new president-elect (if applicable) to be postponed.

[chicken-cem.livejournal.com]

Can't say anything here but to agree with you. Otherwise we'd be edging towards a dictatorship in which the dictator (Bush) would get to decide how long to stay in office, by continuing to postpone and postpone elections. Obviously it won't go that far, but it still frightens me.

[manfire.livejournal.com]

Yeah, since elections are run by counties on behalf of states and not by the federales, inevitably if anything needs to be postponed the way the NYC 2001 primaries were, it will be something localized. This would set off some hue and cry about how the voter turnout will be higher and/or lower and/or skewed in the place where the election was postponed because the people there already know how the rest of the country voted, kind of like the usual clothes-rending over polls closing in the East before the West Coast (or the Florida Panhandle 2000 thing), but nobody would care much after a week or two except for the inveterate axe-grinders.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

UNLESS, UNLESS, the national election is extremely, extremely close.

[jwgh]

If the election is close and it actually matters what the state with the postponed election does, then there will be much gnashing of the teeth.

If the postponed state doesn't actually make a difference, then that will still make people angry for all sorts of other reasons.

Mind you, if things are so bad that an election has to be postponed locally then the entire country will probably have already gone completely insane already.

My prediction for the future: ANGER WITH PATCHES OF MOROSE DEPRESSION AND FRUSTRATION.

[pentomino.livejournal.com]

Counties, eh? What about swing counties with prominent Republicans in charge of that kind of thing?

[lots42.livejournal.com]

Condoleeza Rice was on CNN saying they ain't gonna delay no elections

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

Like i told the last guy to bring this up, she HAS to deny it, or else she isn't gettin' any from her boyfriend Dubya.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Oh, I seriously doubt they'll actually try it. This was, like any number of other freaky things they've said, a trial balloon to see how the public would respond to a proposed expansion of executive power.

And at the present moment, it was astoundingly politically stupid. They must realize that a significant fraction of the US population is extremely sensitive to anything implying that Bush might mess with the election, for reasons that everybody knows. They may have figured that those people aren't in Bush's base anyway, but the last thing they'd need is to get them more riled up.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

...Unless this is yet more evidence for my very own paranoid theory: The Bush administration has intentionally spread all the election-rigging rumors, in order to convince liberals and progressives that voting is pointless!!

Or maybe this is exactly what I want you to think!

[jwgh]

Gaaah! Matt McIrvin has sent me through the mirror, people!

[doctroid.livejournal.com]

> We've gone through the burning of Washington, the Civil War

This provided some entertaining thinking for me on the drive in this morning, as I wondered about the 1864 election: What happened to the south's electoral votes? Not cast? Cast by electors from some "government in exile"?

They were, it turns out, not cast, and wouldn't have made a difference anyway: Lincoln won in an electoral college landslide, 212 electoral votes to McClellan's 21, and the states in rebellion had only 80 votes to add to the tally.

As that same page says, though, before early September "Lincoln’s chances for reelection appeared dim"; he was unpopular because the war was not going well and because of the Emancipation Proclamation. Sherman's capture of Atlanta apparently is what turned Lincoln's fortunes around (in some sense -- of course if he hadn't been re-elected, he probably wouldn't have been assassinated, right?). Suppose that hadn't happened, and the election had been closer, and the Democratic candidate had been one who hadn't repudiated the party's platform calling for a cease fire and negotiated settlement. Granted that's a lot of supposes, but then it could have set up an interesting scenario in which the Confederate states chose electors and submitted their electoral college votes! Even though the Confederacy itself claimed it was no longer part of the United States, the official Union line was that the Confederate states' secession was illegal and inoperative. Washington would have had to either rescind that view and grant the fact of the South's secession, or stick by it and accept their right to cast votes in the election. (Or find some rationale to reject the electoral votes of states considered to still be in the US. Given how the southern states were handled during Reconstruction, this is probably what would've happened.)

Well, anyway, it was amusing until I hit the traffic jam at the Bridge Street exit.

[manfire.livejournal.com]

By the way, you fellows might be interested in this page that shows you electoral-college results maps from some past presidential election. The idea is that you try to guess what year the map represents, and then you "click" on the "map" with your "mouse" to see if you were right.