Isikoff - Election Day Worries Michael Isikoff broke the story last week that Tom Ridge and the Department of Homeland Security was looking into how this fall's elections might be suspended in the event of a major terrorist attack. Though the folks at the World Socialist Web Site are reckless with their accusations and conclusions about the Bush Administration, (see,
Bush administration takes steps to cancel US election ) I think they raise a legitimate concern- I'm not sure that I want the President, especially a President seeking reelection, to be able to postpone or otherwise manipulate (or even appear to manipulate) the circumstances of the election. How to avoid a Madrid-esque result in the US is a real dilemma, but I think allowing the federal government to have control over the process shifts the balance of power between the states and the federal government greatly in the favor of the the federal side. If each state wanted to move the election, that might be one thing, and any advantage or disadvantage from the change would at least be decided by elected representatives who do not directly stand to gain or lose in the federal election? This is not a very fully formed alternative solution here, but my point is that letting Bush move the election at his administration's discretion is too heavy handed. It seems like something that a dictator would do, and it is all too convenient that the change would serve to mute the anti-bush outrage that might come from another catastrophic 9/11 style terror attack. A sort of "I might lose, so we had better change the rules" approach that you would expect from some rogue African or South American regime run by warlords. This is exactly the kind of ammunition that the whacks of the world like Michael Moore and the Socialists are looking for. It is what makes them appear credible in the eyes of the public.
Once Governments get power, they don't tend to give it back. I worry that we are crossing the threshold of an era where we will be constantly at war, and that exigent circumstance will serve as justification to erode all of our civil liberties, and any sense of seclusion, anonymity, liberty, or privacy that we ever had.
