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Tuesday, July 13, 2004

Follow the bouncing ball

As I noted before, a lot of people are conceding that if there was a terrorist attack on election day, that the election should be rescheduled, because they wouldn't want anyone to be disenfranchised due to the attack. Like I said earlier, we already have local election officials for that.
But if BushCo can convince enough people to concede that the feds should have the authority to reschedule the election in case of a terrorist attack, they will start pushing for more power. Just watch--if they can get people to buy their authority to reschedule due to a terrorist attack, the wording will subtly change from "terrorist attack" to "terrorist threat".

Edited to add this link: Jack K. at Ruminate This makes a good point--why would the terrorists attack on election day, since there's no way to predict how that would influence the vote? My guess is it would ratchet up support for Bush, but there's no way to know.
To my mind, that's just another reason that I think my theory about why they want to move election day around holds water. My theory is that they are trying to drive down voter turnout. The harder it is to get to the polls, the higher the percentage of people who do vote are Republicans, because they are often freer with their schedule or live in districts with more accesible voting polls. Since they have a well-researched habit of doing everything in their power to drive down voter turnout, there's no reason to believe that this isn't part of that pattern.

4 Comments:

Blogger Earnest said...

I would think that a massive terrorist attack would be scheduled (were it to be scheduled for the purpose of influencing the election) just before the election to follow the Madrid template. Were a massive catastrophe to happen, hampering elections in a state, it would make sense to postpone the election in the locality to avoid disenfranchising the citizens in that locality. However, if you postpone the election in the locality of the catastrophe, you probably, by state constitution, will have to postpone the election in the state. You can't postpone the state's election, though, without Congress's resetting the date for the rest of the country. The Constitution is explicit in stating that the election day will take place on the same day throughout the union. What the Constitution doesn't state is what day the elections should be held.

7/13/2004

 
Blogger Amanda Marcotte said...

The Constitution does say that, and election day will be held on the same day throughout the country. But if there is a terrorist attack in one part, I hardly see why the feds should have authority. Fine--close those polls, have an emergency meeting of Congress, have them extend the date to two weeks later and you're done. I highly doubt that it would be so much trouble that we need to just give over that authority to the President, who clearly intends to use it for political gain.

7/13/2004

 
Blogger Earnest said...

I think that maybe the point is just that there should be a plan, even if the plan is as you like it: letting Congress make an emergency vote on postponing the election to a reasonable and close date. We've been asking over and over again, "Why was there no plan for a terrorist attack by airplane on large buildings in New York?" Why add "Why was there no plan for ensuring that the elections were carried out to the best of our ability after a devestating terrorist attack?" to the list?

7/14/2004

 
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2/03/2006

 

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