So Much for Voting Rights

After three and a half years, it’s pretty obvious that the Bush Administration is not a wellspring of brilliant, well-thought-out ideas. But this latest one takes the cake. Newsweek says that the White House is looking into ways of postponing the November presidential election if an al Qaeda attack occurs.

Such consideration was doubtlessly triggered by the Spanish elections earlier this year in which, three days after a believed al Qaeda attack, the government which backed the American invasion of Iraq was voted out of office and replaced by one which promptly pulled out. Afterwards, comments flew about how al Qaeda had supposedly influenced the election and how the spineless Spaniards had played right into their hands.

Even if such a take is accurate, it doesn’t take a raving paranoid to see the potential for abuse here. For how long would elections be postponed? A day? A week? A year? For that matter, who says the elections only have to be postponed? Why not just cancel them outright until the security situation becomes more settled? If that isn’t for five or ten years, well, we were told this is a new kind of war. And why wait for an attack to actually happen? Why not postpone or even cancel the elections preemptively, just in case they’re thinking of trying something? (That’ll show ’em!) Besides, you don’t want the terrorists to win – or do you?

This is quite possibly one of the dumbest ideas ever to come out of the Bush Administration, and that’s really saying something. The very cornerstone of American democracy is regular elections to choose the people who (at least theoretically) represent our interests in government. As Senator Dianne Feinstein pointed out, “We hold elections in the middle of war, in the middle of earthquakes, in the middle of whatever it takes.” Our democracy is strong enough to withstand whatever al Qaeda and their ilk can throw at us, despite what some in the White House seem to believe.