Investigating a Vote Delay?

This seems to be a growing story in the Blogosphere, and I expect the conspiracy buffs to go hog wild with it: U.S. Mulling How to Delay Nov. Vote in Case of Attack.

A few initial thoughts:

1) It seems prudent for Homeland Security to at least investigate the options. If there was a major attack on election day, there can be no doubt that the HS Department would be roundly (and rightly) criticized for not having a plan in place. If there was a truly disruptive attack , issues of whether the votes of certain citizens would be counted or not would be a major issue. For example, imagine the hue and cry if a major attack disrupted Miami, causing strongly Democratic parts of Florida to be unable to vote, or for conditions to be such that voters were afraid to leave their homes. Indeed, any attack aimed at a major city would almost certainly negatively affect Democratic voters (just look at the Red and Blue map and see how almost every major metropolitan area in the country went for Gore).

2) This whole process is contingency planning.

3) Those who think this is some master plan for the Evil Bush to stay in power extra-constitutionally are just as looney as the right-wingers who thought Clinton was going to use the Florida kerfuffle to extend his stay in office (for a representative example of that brilliant line of reasoning, go here).

4) Hopefully mainstream left/Democrat bloggers won't go nuts on this, but we shall see...

Joe Gandelman is blogging on this as well, as is Kristopher of The World Around You and James Joyner.

The main story (brief as it is) is here.

Best I can figure, it would take a federal law to grant such powers to the HSD. One wonders whether Congress will act on this issue, however.

Posted by Steven Taylor at July 11, 2024 09:37 PM | TrackBack