Election security

I've written earlier about the spectacularly bad idea of postponing the presidential election on the basis of actual or threatened terrorist attacks.

Nixon's former presidential counsel John Dean has written one of the more thoughtful analyses of this issue that I've seen.  He thinks that some advance planning is worthwhile to guard against attempts by terrorists to attack the electoral system.  He points to some potential problems in presidential succession, particularly in the case where the elected presidential candidate would be assassinated before taking office.

I'm not convinced it's quite the problem he argues it is.  But he does have some good points.  And I don't think he's reverting back to Nixonian habits.  He's taking a look at potential gaps in national electoral system that could be vulnerable to attack by enemies of the US:  John Dean, What Happens In The Event Of A Terror Attack On The 2004 Presidential Elections? Findlaw 07/19/04.

Almost three years have passed since 9/11, and in all that time, official Washington has largely failed to tackle the entire matter of continuity of government -- which is no small issue in an age of terrorism. Other than building a state of the art bomb shelter for Vice President Dick Cheney at his residence, nothing has been done to protect our election processes from terrorism - even with respect to the crucial positions of president and vice president. ...

Dean argues that although both major parties have procedures in place to select a new candidate should one or both of the national ticket die before the election, but they are not designed to work swiftly.

Dean takes the possibility of attack on polling places on Election Day seriously, based in part on the work of the conservative American Enterprise Insitutute (AEI):

On November 2, 2004, around fifty-one percent of adult Americans will go to polling places -- schools, libraries, community centers and private residences -- to cast their vote. Virtually none of these polling places will be protected from terrorists. Only those voting by absentee ballot will be safe.

Suppose there were to be an organized effort by terrorists to implement a diabolical scheme of attacking polling locations throughout the day and across the nation -- no doubt particularly focusing on the so-called swing states that may determine the election's outcome. It would undoubtedly keep terrified voters from the polls in droves. And it would distort and disrupt the democratic process.

As I've mentioned before, something similar to this actually did occur on 9/11/01.  New York City was having elections that day.  They were rescheduled and held later with no lasting damage to the democratic process.  Such a terrorist attack is certainly a concern.  But the election is more likely to be damaged by voter fraud in Florida than by an al-Qaeda plot to send out dozens of suicide bombers to neighborhood polling places in Ohio.

Even the "M-11" Madrid attack this year aimed at more spectacular results.  So far as I've heard, there is no evidence that the perpetrators specifically timed the attack to influence the election.  Dean also carelessly assumes the Republican Party conventional wisdom that the Madrid attack did influence the election's outcome, a subjective conclusion that are poorly supported (if at all) by polling data in Spain.  At best, it's a simplistic conclusion.  Dean recognizes, though, that the exact effect of a terrorist attack prior to the US election cannot easily be predicted:  "While the Madrid train bombing influenced the election of an anti-war government, a U.S. equivalent (or worse) might have just the opposite effect."

Dean also points to the particular vulnerability of senior officials during the presidential inaguration itself.

His article is highly critical of the Bush administration for not addressing some of these issues in a realistic basis.  But Dean, whose own experience with authoritarian-minded Republicans may lead him to be particularly skeptical in this regard, doesn't rule it out that the Bush team's neglect in this regard may be deliberate:

The Bush Administration has ignored all these problems -- all of which have been on the table since 9/11. Why? It would be cynical to suggest that they believe they might politically benefit from any of these untoward events. But it might also be accurate.

Politically, it is possible they might receive a short term gain from a terrorist attack - if it were seen as vindicating Bush's aggressive stances, or if it simply triggered an upswell of patriotism that benefited the sitting President. ...

But if such an attack occurs at any phases of the election process, and Americans realize that they are a nation without laws and procedures to deal with it, this failure will forever rest on a Republican president and Congress. Once the nation has return to normal, it will not be easy to forgive these failures.

Dean's excellent book on the Bush administration's addiction to secrecy, Worse Than Watergate: The Secret Presidency of George W. Bush (2004), has been published in German under the title Das Ende der Demokratie (The End of Democracy).