Continuity of Elections

I don't know if I exactly agree with Atrios's negative reading of this item, but I understand:

WASHINGTON -- The government needs to establish guidelines for canceling or rescheduling elections if terrorists strike the United States again, says the chairman of a new federal voting commission.

Such guidelines do not currently exist, said DeForest B. Soaries, head of the voting panel.

Soaries was appointed to the federal Election Assistance Commission last year by President Bush. Soaries said he wrote to National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge in April to raise the concerns.

Surely does sound like the beginning of the end. But read on and Soaries sounds less and less like the harbinger of the presidency for life:

"Look at the possibilities. If the federal government were to cancel an election or suspend an election, it has tremendous political implications. If the federal government chose not to suspend an election it has political implications," said Soaries, a Republican and former secretary of state of New Jersey.

"Who makes the call, under what circumstances is the call made, what are the constitutional implications?" he said. "I think we have to err on the side of transparency to protect the voting rights of the country."

[. . .]

Soaries also said he wants to know what federal officials are doing to increase security on Election Day. He said security officials must take care not to allow heightened security measures to intimidate minority voters, but that local and state election officials he's talked to have not been told what measures to expect.

That doesn't sound bad to me. One of the really difficult realities to emerge after Abu Ghraib and the torture memos broke was the fact that Bush administration people, namely the Justice Department, were trying to outline a compelling ex post facto reasoning for breaking the law. It would be different if Bush went to Congress or the international community and said that he needed wider discretion in prosecuting prisoners of war, but that's not what happened. I sense it's the same with an election crisis: It would be far better to have a law on the books, even a PATRIOT Act, than to have the Bush administration just wing it.

This issue seems more important by an order of magnitude than the post-catastrophe continuity of government hypotheticals, much discussed by Matthew Yglesias and others. If Congress gets blown away, we're definitely in deep shit, but that's simply less likely than, say, a late October attack anywhere in the country. The 5/11 Spain attacks perhaps suggest a precedent for this kind of planning. Moreover, elections are proctored at the state level—as we all remember from 2000—so any state reaction that affected the election process would inspire howls of outrage from one side of the aisle or the other. And if Florida in 2000 is any indication, jury-rigged elections nicely lend themselves to partisan engineering. (Really the 2000 election proves that new laws are warranted regardless of doomsday scenarios.)

I think it's Jim Henley who's said that the real nut of the war on terror is an essential crisis (as opposed to some passé existential one). As what sort of nation are we going to fight this war on terror? The torture, detainees, intelligence, international committments, etc., are all conflated with that question. For what it's worth I think it's best that we set reasonable legal expectations for ourselves and unambiguously heed those limitations—no simple prescription, but better than watching executive fumble after fumble.

Posted by Kriston at June 30, 2004 11:09 AM