This Week's Editorial(7/11): Cancel the Election?

I opened up my web browser Monday morning and was shocked when I read the first headline under the news section on msn.com: "U.S. mulls plan to cancel election." I quickly opened the article and read that the office of Tom Ridge, Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, has asked the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel to find out what would need to be done if a terrorist attack were to take place during a federal election. Apparently there is no federal agency that has the authorization to cancel or reschedule a federal election.

I decided to look up some more information. If the feds were interested in postponing the election because of possible terrorist attacks, someone else must have written about it. I found only four articles on Monday, and they all say pretty much the same thing: there are no guidelines in place. DeForest B. Soaries, head of the Election Assistance Commission (former pastor and failed GOP 2002 Congressional candidate from the state of New Jersey), asked Condoleeza Rice and Tom Ridge to ask Congress if they would approve the federal government to hold power over whether an election should be postponed or canceled.

Wait. Canceled? A Bush appointee would like Congress to give the Bush-run federal government a free pass to CANCEL an election? What happens when you cancel an election, you just don’t have one for another four years? Even if there is a terrorist attack in the United States on election day, the government should never have the right to just up and cancel the election. Ever.

In New York City, after 9/11, Mayor Giuliani wanted to extend his term for ninety days so he could continue with his efforts to help rebuild the city. He felt that a new mayor wouldn’t know all the he knew, and wouldn’t be able to handle being tossed in the middle of everything. But he was denied extension of his term, AFTER an attack ACTUALLY happened. The New Yorkers had their election, and a new governor entered office when he was supposed to. Life continued on.

More to the point, there are no provisions in our Constitution that allow for cancellation of a presidential election. One takes place every four years. Period. The founding fathers didn't just forget to enter a provision for election cancellation or postponement.

You might want to argue with me and say that these are scary times--who knows when someone might come and attack us without notice. I would argue that it was scary times back then too. The British were in charge of Canada until it became its own country in 1867; and they were still pretty pissed off about the Revolutionary War. And Lincoln didn't cancel the 1864 election during the Civil War, a war that took at least 618,000 people's lives. Postponement of the election was suggested, but Lincoln wrote "We can not have free government without elections; and if the rebellion could force us to forego, or postpone a national election it might fairly claim to have already conquered and ruined us."

Lincoln also wrote that the election of 1864 "has demonstrated that a people's government can sustain a national election, in the midst of a great civil war. Until now it has not been known to the world that this was a possibility." If we can hold an election when we're trying to kill each other, we should be able to hold one in spite of others' attempts to harm us. We should show the world again that our democracy will not be intimidated or threatened by anyone.

And hey, wasn’t it George Bush who said that we should keep on working and shopping to show the terrorists that we wouldn't let them screw with our lives? That shutting down, changing the way we do things was just letting the terrorists win? We should keep on voting as well. To paraphrase Lincoln, fucking with the cornerstone of our democracy might allow the terrorists to claim that they've won.