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The Daily Whim

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Mon. Jul 12, 2004

The Election Question

It’s time to talk about election terror. No, I don’t mean the abrasive expletive-filled tone of the debate continually terrorizing the populace for four more months. We’ve pretty much brought that on ourselves, and a significant percentage of us actually seem to enjoy it. I’m talking about another threat, and potential response, that has got a lot of people talking:

American counterterrorism officials, citing what they call “alarming” intelligence about a possible Qaeda strike inside the United States this fall, are reviewing a proposal that could allow for the postponement of the November presidential election in the event of such an attack.

Homeland officials say that as drastic as such proposals sound, they are taking them seriously — along with other possible contingency plans in the event of an election-eve or Election Day attack. “We are reviewing the issue to determine what steps need to be taken to secure the election,” says Brian Roehrkasse, a Homeland spokesman.

MSNBC: “Exclusive: Election Day Worries”

You can imagine some of the knee jerk responses to that announcement; prelude to dictatorship. Unfortunately, one can make a fairly compelling case that the Bush administration should have known that would be the natural reaction of some, and did their dead-level worst to make sure this announcment fed such fears. It was a fairly brain dead release, more than vague enough to allow the critics to run wild. But there is no reason for us to mimic it. It would have been wise to have announced this in conjunction with Congressional leadership, to show some non-partisan thought had been put into it. Fortunately, some people have been spurred to start posing the hard questions we must answer on this issue.

From Kevin Drum:

I still don’t think this is part of any nefarious plot to turn America into Amerika, but there’s not really much point in arguing about it. If you believe this, nothing I say is going to change your mind.

What’s intriguing, though, is that the paranoia is so thick that no one is bothering to talk about whether this is a good idea on a substantive level. Should a nationwide election be cancelled in the event of a major terrorist attack? And if so, should a federal commission be allowed to make the call?

My initial noodling is equivocal: I suppose it’s always a good idea to be prepared, but we didn’t feel like we needed the power to reschedule elections in 1864 and we didn’t feel like we needed it in the 1950s when we were worried about nuclear holocaust. Why do we need it now?

From Will Collier:

...this is a dumb idea. But it’s far better to talk now, and get the dumb ideas supplanted by smart ideas, than to have to figure out our responses from scratch in the aftermath.

I’m not just talking about military responses, either. It’s incumbent (no pun intended, honest) upon all of us to think now about what a pre-election terrorist attack means, and that includes what it means politically, both on a national scale and to us as individuals.

Terrorism has already moved one nation to change its government and leave the field of battle. We dare not allow it to work here, but we cannot discount the possibility, either. It’s time, right now, for all of us to think, and talk, and reach our own level of resolve about how we’re going to react, how we’re going to carry on, and yes, how we’re going to vote if and when more of our countrymen are slaughtered in the name of Islamofascism.

Again: we dare not allow their designs to work here. And so we’d better get ready to foil those designs, now, rather than let ourselves be caught up in post-attack turmoil, when we are psychologically weakest.

And from Richard in a comment to another article here:

On the other hand, I think the perception that we live in a democracy (sort of) is important to our way of life. Part of that perception is solidly reinforced by a regular election cycle, that continues come hell or high water.

Unfortunately, and I say this with a heavy heart, given the mis-representations and outright lies that have been pouring from the current administration, I’m more inclined to view an election postponement as yet another Republican trick to stall for better polls.

And Richard isn’t alone in that respect. Which is all the more reason that the announcement should have spelled out some of the potential “hell and high water,” and deflect the natural political response with some real possibilities.

What if a physical attack on New York or DC also causes a massive blackout in the surrounding areas for 24-72 hours … the day before the election? That’s just one example, but I can think of many scenarios where people could be physically deprived of the opportunity to vote in the aftermath of an attack, in large numbers. New York was having a primary election on 9/11. If they hadn’t immediately postponed it, how many people in New York would have been physically unable to vote at their registered precinct? My guess is 100,000 to 500,000. More than enough to swing a tight election, or forever make it a questionable tally.

In such circumstances, do we forge ahead with the election, and it’s just tough those people got disenfranchised by a terror attack? In a democracy, is it more important to make sure everyone gets a fair vote, or that the elections happen exactly on the date they are specified? Does it make any difference that the train is running on time if not everyone could get on board?

One of the things that needs to be done is think about the parameters, many of which could be defined in advance by Congress. If Al Qaeda attacks a football stadium during the first weekend in October, that’s no cause to delay the election. But you could say, for example, in the five to seven days prior to the election, a “mass casualty” event, or one which affects critical infrastructure, would be cause for an assessment by some preselected non-partisan group. If that group decides a significant number of people might be unable to vote as a result of the attack’s aftermath, they would trigger a postponement of a preset amount of time. Perhaps two weeks.

That’s just my off the top of my head proposal. But the point is, these things can be talked out and reasonably decided, in a non-partisan manner. At least, I cling desperately to that fantasy. Because there really is a threat here, and to ascribe this all to a potential grab for power is a symptom of partisan myopia. And if it was done transparently and openly, I think it could actually lessen the benefit of such an attack; you’ve spelled out, it won’t work, here’s what we’ll do.

Eliminating the surprise for everyone also minimizes the potential impact of the attempt at terrorism.

Now, as to the threat itself. It’s somehow become conventional wisdom that Al Qaeda despises Bush, and this election is critical to the War on Terror. This ignores the fact that Al Qaeda attacked our embassies and one of our warships during Clinton’s presidency, and began the planning and training for 9/11 before Bush was even a declared presidential candidate. The attacks didn’t stop when Clinton left office, nor will they stop if Bush leaves office … or if he stays.

Al Qaeda’s violent hatred is not motivated by single personalities. Yussuf al-Ayyeri, a close associate of bin Laden later killed in a gun battle with Saudi security, once said “It is not the American war machine that should be of the utmost concern to Muslims. What threatens the future of Islam, in fact its very survival, is American democracy.”

These extremists fear American democracy, and its clear separation of church and state (this is a point I think many on the right badly miss, as they try to break down that wall, from the Christian side). Therefore, it follows that Al Qaeda would love to stick a thumb in the eye of our elective process.

So, why haven’t they?

How hard would it have been? It was a big unspoken fear of mine early this year. Instead of 20 guys in airplanes, why not 20 guys with suicide parkas, hitting random primary polling places during February and March? With the right timing and strategically chosen targets (a big city precinct, a rural one, an ethnic one, east, west, north, south, etc.), you would have had a good shot at turning the entire democratic process into a barbed wire camp.

I mention it now only because it’s too late for that. Instead of six or eight months of extended terror, enough time has passed that they’ve reduced themselves to a single shot strategy. And while the conventional wisdom is that an attack would cause the country to rally around Bush, I think the fallout from an attack is wildly uncertain. Both in terms of how I’d personally react, and the larger core questions: how would they attack? What does Al Qaeda gain from a single shot attack? In terms of US politics, what outcome would they want?

Do they really think they would benefit by Bush losing and Kerry taking office? And if so, do they believe, as many Americans do, that an attack would simply rally people around Bush? By that logic, they would sit this one out. In fact, they might merely launch a “chatter campaign,” seeing how they’ve been so successful in the past, and see if the Bush administration hangs themselves reacting to it.

There’s a large part of me that thinks they truly don’t care who is in the Oval Office. And all of me is certain they’d love to blow it up, no matter who sits there. When it comes to trying to get inside their mindset, I come up way short, so I don’t have a firm conviction about how they’ll attack us or whether it will be “election themed.” Logic fails when applied to Al Qaeda.

I guess I can only speak for myself, but the nature of any attack between now and November would largely determine how I would respond electorally, if at all. If Al Qaeda manages to deploy a new tactic we’d not considered, I’m likely to remain open minded. If they blow up a nuke or dirty bomb in a shipping container across the Hudson River from Manhattan, I’m going to have a freakin’ cow, and drag it bleeding into the voting booth.

In the end, of course, I have nothing to compare it to other than 9/11. Imagine if we’d had to vote on something important the Friday afterwards, rather than have a national day of mourning? On that Friday, we would have been willing to elect Dr. Strangelove. I would argue that a significant portion of the populace was electorally incapacitated those first few days.

In that respect, all of the people quoted above are correct. The time to talk about it, think about it, and decide how to react to it is not when it happens. Not in the “post-attack turmoil, when we are psychologically weakest.” Not when you’re ready to climb on the bomb and ride it down to the ground. It’s now.

No, you can’t know all the variables. You can’t even imagine them. You can’t prejudge every potential attack, and how you’d react to it. But you can be a lot more specific than our government is being so far.

Posted 9:01PM, Mon, Jul 12 2004 in · · 7 Comments below


Peanut Gallery

1  Dan S wrote:

I agree with your thoughtful consideration of the case in question … but I wonder if you stopped one step away from what is probably the real threat directly ahead: Diebold voting.

As I’ve watched the Bush II Presidency unfold, time & again I’ve seen the same tactic: while ‘they’ have as all looking one way at one thing and duking it out Left/Center/Right, they actually know the issue is on just enough simmer to create just enough smog, fog, steam & obfuscation to camoflauge what’s really important. Again: Diebold voting.

Just imagine how long the ‘selection’ will be postponed when it comes out 20 seconds after the polls close that 1 out of every 100 machines burped or had malware installed. Bush will stay ‘Acting President’ until the very last bit (not ballot!) is accounted for.

Endless war, endless Presidency.

Comment by Dan S · 07/12/04 09:35 PM
2  Reid wrote:

You know, I partially wrote this article because another comment thread was veering off topic. And no matter what I write about, there is no way to cover every potential conspiracy that’s been spoken about Bush. If I could write about Diebold in any convincing way, someone would come along in the comments to throw down the Oil-Saudi-Afghan pipeline conspiracy. All I can do is echo what I’ve already quoted once from Kevin Drum:

“I still don’t think this is part of any nefarious plot to turn America into Amerika, but there’s not really much point in arguing about it. If you believe this, nothing I say is going to change your mind.”

Comment by Reid · 07/12/04 09:53 PM
3  Combustible Boy wrote:

Poor Kevin Drum. No matter how level-headed he is in his posts, his commenters still act nutty. Did you get a load of the post in which Kevin acknowledged that there are some (some!) liberals who overly downplay the threat of terrorists getting WMDs, and then his commenters jumped in to prove his point by saying that, y’know, it’s no big deal if a city gets nuked or whatever because you’re more likely to be struck by lightning or something, y’know.

As for temporary election postponement à la the New York City primaries in 2001, it seems sensible to expect that absent any other plan, any postponement would happen on a local basis due to the extremely localized nature of American election authority. If the election’s really close, this could lead to wailing and gnashing of teeth about how the people in the affected locales get to know how the rest of the country voted before they go to the polls. Of course, if anything big enough to force a postponement happened anywhere, things would probably be pretty crazy anyway. This doesn’t seem like an easy problem to resolve (if you grant that it ought to be resolved somehow), and anyway it seems unlikely that any decent resolution of the problem could be put forward in the current political atmosphere. Maybe after the election takes place (and I’m sure it will, and I frankly doubt anything out of the ordinary will happen), things will cool down enough that people can take a look at the problem then.

By the way, Reid, if you want to be driven to your own wailing and gnashing of teeth, check out the Fark comments thread on the election-postponement issue.

Comment by Combustible Boy · 07/13/04 01:07 AM
4  Paul wrote:

“Bush will stay ‘Acting President’ until the very last bit (not ballot!) is accounted for.

Endless war, endless Presidency.”

If you know the Constitution, then you know that can never happen, given how our electoral process works. It’s the same ignorance responsible for the “Selected President ” meme.

Whether the election is postponed or not, each State’s electors will meet and cast their votes for the candidates, and then those votes will be tallied in Congress.

Constitution, Article II, Section 1:
Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors, equal to the whole Number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress: but no Senator or Representative, or Person holding an Office of Trust or Profit under the United States, shall be appointed an Elector.

The Congress may determine the Time of chusing the Electors, and the Day on which they shall give their Votes; which Day shall be the same throughout the United States.

The XII Amendment:

The Electors shall meet in their respective states, and vote by ballot for President and Vice-President, one of whom, at least, shall not be an inhabitant of the same state with themselves; they shall name in their ballots the person voted for as President, and in distinct ballots the person voted for as Vice-President, and they shall make distinct lists of all persons voted for as President, and of all persons voted for as Vice-President and of the number of votes for each, which lists they shall sign and certify, and transmit sealed to the seat of the government of the United States, directed to the President of the Senate;

The President of the Senate shall, in the presence of the Senate and House of Representatives, open all the certificates and the votes shall then be counted;

The person having the greatest Number of votes for President, shall be the President, if such number be a majority of the whole number of Electors appointed; and if no person have such majority, then from the persons having the highest numbers not exceeding three on the list of those voted for as President, the House of Representatives shall choose immediately, by ballot, the President. But in choosing the President, the votes shall be taken by states, the representation from each state having one vote; a quorum for this purpose shall consist of a member or members from two-thirds of the states, and a majority of all the states shall be necessary to a choice. And if the House of Representatives shall not choose a President whenever the right of choice shall devolve upon them, before the fourth day of March next following, then the Vice-President shall act as President, as in the case of the death or other constitutional disability of the President.

The person having the greatest number of votes as Vice-President, shall be the Vice-President, if such number be a majority of the whole number of Electors appointed, and if no person have a majority, then from the two highest numbers on the list, the Senate shall choose the Vice-President; a quorum for the purpose shall consist of two- thirds of the whole number of Senators, and a majority of the whole number shall be necessary to a choice. But no person constitutionally ineligible to the office of President shall be eligible to that of Vice-President of the United States.

In the unlikely event those series of events are bungled, then the XX Amendment protects against “Endless Presidency”:

1. The terms of the President and Vice President shall end at noon on the 20th day of January, and the terms of Senators and Representatives at noon on the 3d day of January, of the years in which such terms would have ended if this article had not been ratified; and the terms of their successors shall then begin.

[...]

3. If, at the time fixed for the beginning of the term of the President, the President elect shall have died, the Vice President elect shall become President. If a President shall not have been chosen before the time fixed for the beginning of his term, or if the President elect shall have failed to qualify, then the Vice President elect shall act as President until a President shall have qualified; and the Congress may by law provide for the case wherein neither a President elect nor a Vice President elect shall have qualified, declaring who shall then act as President, or the manner in which one who is to act shall be selected, and such person shall act accordingly until a President or Vice President shall have qualified.

Comment by Paul · 07/13/04 04:21 PM
5  Reid wrote:

CB, you mean Kevin has comments? Seriously, I avoid comments threads like that and Fark’s (and multiple other sites) for the sake of my sanity. It’s not enlightening, it’s not entertaining, it’s simply infuriating.

And … Paul … (I make an effort, but that still sounds strange to me), nice try. But just because that mere piece of old paper has exerted control over 42 Presidents doesn’t mean it can control the 43rd, because, well, he’s got Super Secret Special Evil Powers. Or something. Whatever it is, it’s exactly the opposite of the Evil Powers that Clinton controlled. But still evil. However, if he didn’t, this article on the Consitutional issues might be relevant and of interest.

In the end, it seems the hub-bub has already died down a bit. This morning, Condoleezza Rice seemed to be saying they weren’t going to do anything like this at all. She said she didn’t even know where the idea had come from.

So, either it’s a trial balloon that got shot down, or some lower level guy talking above his rank.

So, stand down, everyone. Dictatorship averted. At least one more day.

Comment by Reid · 07/13/04 04:42 PM
6  rturner wrote:

I just got back from the Atl. Gift Show (where I saw heightened security closed access areas that I never saw in the past, during the Olympics or after 9/11). I typed out some scrool and went to preview it to check spelling and I noticed that it seemed to hang. I don’t think it was your site; I think it was yet another Firefox bug. So I quickly copied my long scrool and pulled up IE. IE then crashed. Fearing imminent collapse, I pulled up my trusty notepad to at least save a 20 minute scrool. Nope, Notepad stopped responding when I hit paste. So I left the whole mess stinking in the other room and I’m on a different machine, starting from scratch.

First of all, when I inadvertently hijacked your thread, I had just come from reading the Newsweek article and was still going Huh?!? I’m sorry, it was a good thread without the hijack.

Thinking about election postponement in my booth at the Gift Show (I had plenty of time to think, as the customers were sparse; the rumor was that the terror talk before the show killed the crowds at the year’s second biggest show.) I realized that I’d yet again been duped. The real point of the election memo an administration official passed to Newsweek was to get people talking about terror and the elections in one breath. And they snagged me hook line and sinker.

The last time they got me was the midterm elections and the hook was “the next smoking gun will come in the form of a mushroom cloud.” They got me good with that one. That shit scares the hell out of me.

So during the last election (a very successful election for the Republicans) the theme was Iraq, Iraq, Iraq. This time it’s terror, terror, terror. Could there be an actual election-eve terrorist attack? Hell yes. Am I scared? Hell yes. Would I be surprised if there wasn’t one…uh, no. It’s kind of like the little boy who cried wolf, these days you can’t tell where the politics leaves off and the reality begins. It’s really very sad.

My mother, a lifelong Republican who voted for Bush in 2000, no longer trusts him and is bitterly opposed to his re-election. She was planning to vote for Kerry this time. I say was because this time she doesn’t plan on leaving the house. “Alice says they’re gonna blow up the polling places and kidnap people from malls and cut their heads off. I’m not going anywhere!” “But Mom”, I said, “they’re not going to hit (her tiny town in upstate NY).” “Oh yes they will. They’re pouring over the border from Canada as we speak.”

Sigh.

Comment by rturner · 07/13/04 09:31 PM
7  Reid wrote:

Sorry to start a domino effect on your desktop, man. Maybe you need to tweak that thing some more…

And you didn’t really “hijack” that thread. I could just see how others would follow up to your comment, and it was a topic I’d wanted to write about. I just hadn’t found the time. So it was really more of what you’d expect from a donkey .. a kick. Just got another one in my inbox, about another really long and important topic I’ve half written.

Damn, you people keep me busy.

Maybe you’re right. Perhaps this was all an exercise in Pav*Rov*ian training; “when you hear the terror bell ring, you’ll vote Republican! And drool!”

But you should never atrribute malice to an event that is easily explained by mere incompetence. I think someone was just talking way above their rank, and got snuffed in one news cycle.

But your story about your Mom brings an ironic possibility to mind. The people most likely to fall into real fear of an election attack are also likely True Believers in Bush. What if they succeed in scaring people about terrorism so well … that 5% of their base doesn’t go to the polls?

What if Al Qaeda has learned from vast experience that the “best bang for their buck” is the “chatter attack”? And their increasing amount of juicy well laid chatter causes Ridge to start flinching like Barney Fife and John Ashcroft to break into song when asked tough questions?

Yes, folks, November is a long time away. And anything could happen. Why just yesterday, I heard we were headed for dictatorship…

Comment by Reid · 07/14/04 12:25 AM
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