Iowa Hiho!

[AiA in Atlanta]

Right, there is no precedent and any changes would have to be improvised but it could be ugly if election day is delayed.

Could Hurricane Sandy lead to a constitutional crisis? Since 1845, Congress has mandated that the presidential election take place on the Tuesday after the first Monday in November. But no one in the waning days of the Tyler administration anticipated a giant hurricane hitting the East Coast within a week of Election Day. In fact, there is no precedent whatsoever for a natural disaster of this scale before a federal election. A devastating storm, like Sandy, could produce several constitutional and legal crises if voting can’t take place on November 6.

Keith Gaddie, a professor of political science at the University of Oklahoma who focuses on elections, notes that, “[while] the Constitution had mechanisms in place to deal with [the 2000 presidential election], this one may reside out of the realm of process to resolve.” The founders saw the risk of electoral ties and close results, but extreme weather was not a priority in 1787.

There are, however, several instances of state and local elections being rescheduled due to disaster. The New York mayoral primary was supposed to take place on September 11, 2001 and was rescheduled because of the terrorist attacks that day. And weather has previously forced local elections to be delayed in Lewiston, Maine and Washington County, Pennsylvania. Unfortunately, these examples are of little relevance to a presidential contest. Federal elections are fixed by the Constitution, which states “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.”

In fact, the only federal precedent that deals with delaying elections has to do with the tangled history of congressional races in the post Civil Rights South. In the 1982 case Busbee v. Smith, which addresses an attempt by Georgia to delay congressional elections to fix discriminatory redistricting, the District Court for the District of Columbia noted “federal law contemplates that those elections may, under certain circumstances, be held at other times.” Georgia moved the general election for Congress in two districts to November 30.

More importantly, in a follow up case to Busbee, the 11th Circuit said Georgia could hold runoff elections in races where no candidate got a majority by noting that “A plurality outcome in the general election is similar to an election postponed due to natural disaster or voided due to fraud in that each is contemplated, yet beyond the state’s ability to produce. It is this common element that makes their occurrence an ‘exigent’ circumstance.” Those vague words are as close to a precedent as 200 years of federal jurisprudence provides.

Even without rescheduling Election Day, the hurricane could pose all sorts of issues in jurisdictions covered by the Section Five of the Voting Rights Act, which include most of Virginia, as well as Manhattan, Brooklyn and the Bronx. These areas are all deemed to have a history of racial discrimination in elections, and any change to voting procedures in these jurisdictions has to be cleared with the Justice Department. Moving a polling place because of flooding, or closing an early voting site closed because of the storm, would require preclearance from the Justice Department. This would present huge bureaucratic obstacles, but there are work-arounds. According to Chris Elmendorf, a professor at University of California Davis law school, the “DOJ had a kind of pragmatic attitude towards Section Five, and I would expect pragmatism to be reflected in anything they do or they don’t.” Hans von Spakovsky, a former lawyer in the Bush Department of Justice (better known for his advocacy of voter ID), echoed this, noting that the Justice Department regularly deals with this as “local jurisdictions have emergencies all the time.”

Section Five has traditionally been used to address technical problems rather than actual legal issues. In the one truly extraordinary circumstance -- September 11 -- no one complained when New York’s primary election was postponed, even though three of the city’s five boroughs are covered by the Voting Rights Act. However, the stakes and the level of partisanship are much higher in this year’s fierce presidential election than in a comparatively benign mayoral primary.

The only reason that the Presidential election was fixed to occur on only one day in 1845 was to prevent voter fraud. According to a 2004 CRS report, Congress was concerned that in past elections, voters had moved from state to state to cast ballots on different elections. (A practice then known as pipelaying). Little else has been done to adjust the process since. As Rick Hasen, a professor at University of California, Irvine and proprietor of Election Law Blog notes, it would still be legal for presidential electors to be chosen by the state legislature, rather than voters. However, this would likely produce an uproar.

According to Hasen, “ultimately, these things are political and if a state ends up doing something, it’s up to Congress, [which sets the rules for federal elections].” The solution would not be guided by statute since there is so little precedent but instead by what is both expedient and politically acceptable. The basic statutory framework and handful of court cases would be a guide, not an answer. Instead, like any other response to a natural disaster, adjusting Election Day would simply require improvising.

[Super Nova]

Hurricane Sandy might be Obama's October surprise, but history still says he'll lose

The odds are not good for Obama.

Anyone want to make a call on the winner yet?

on the basis of his economic and diplomatic record, Obama is a failure who ought to lose. I make that statement not as a statistician but from the perspective of what has tended to happen throughout the modern history of America. America is a country that loves success and has limited tolerance for political mediocrity. Just ask Hoover, Ford and Carter what failure does to your chances of re-election.

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/timst ... r-kennedy/

[Super Nova]

[AiA in Atlanta]

Hell, I say Obama will win the electoral vote, lose the popular vote and have a 2nd term.

[Super Nova]

Hell, I say Obama will win the electoral vote, lose the popular vote and have a 2nd term.

We will find out soon enough.

[annielaurie]

Hell, I say Obama will win the electoral vote, lose the popular vote and have a 2nd term.

Yes, I too think that's the way it will happen.

[boxy]

Electoral Precedent

"No white guy who's been mentioned on Twitter has gone on to win!"

[AiA in Atlanta]

Electoral Precedent

"No white guy who's been mentioned on Twitter has gone on to win!"

No fat man with facial hair has been elected president since Taft.

[Rorschach]

Is this tactic, making any difference, in the voting intentions of the US citizenry?

Romney hits Obama on 'revenge' vow
November 4, 2012 - 8:14AM

Republican nominee Mitt Romney has chided President Barack Obama for calling on Americans to vote for "revenge" as the battle for the White House raced to an ill-tempered climax.

Three days before voters choose between giving Obama a second term or sending him packing back to Chicago, the rivals chased one another through a handful of states that will decide Tuesday's too-close-to-call election.

Romney was up early in New Hampshire, which has only four of the 270 electoral votes needed to claim the White House but could punch above its weight in a tight finish, accusing Obama of "demonising" political foes.

"I won't represent just one party, I'll represent one nation," Romney told a crowd at an airport rally outside Portsmouth on Saturday, and warned Obama would find it impossible to work with congressional Republicans if he wins re-election.

Romney also debuted a new political ad on Saturday, seizing on Obama's comment in Ohio a day earlier when he told supporters angry at the Republicans not to boo but to vote, saying "voting's the best revenge."

The ad featured Romney telling his biggest crowd of the campaign in Ohio on Friday that Obama "asked his supporters to vote for revenge - for revenge."

"Instead, I ask the American people to vote for love of country," Romney said.

Romney repeated the message on Saturday in New Hampshire and then at a rally in Dubuque, Iowa, where in a show of close combat on the last weekend of the campaign, Obama was set to touchdown for his own event at the same airport just five hours later.

"Words are cheap," Romney told a crowd in Dubuque. "You can say whatever you want to say in a campaign, but what you can achieve - results - those are earned. Those can't be faked."

Obama campaign aide Jen Psaki defended the president's "revenge" comment as a reaction to Romney "scare tactics" that she said came in the form of a Romney television ad aimed at frightening auto workers into thinking their jobs were being shifted overseas.

Obama's message was that "if you don't like the policies, if you don't like the plan that governor Romney is putting forward, if you think that's a bad deal for the middle class, then you can go to the voting booth and cast your ballot," Psaki told reporters. "It's nothing more complicated than that."

Latest polls show Obama and Romney tied nationally, but Obama appears to be solidifying his position in enough of the eight or so swing states that will decide the election to support his hopes of a second term.

AFP

Read more: http://www.theage.com.au/world/romney-h ... z2BCrfbbgK" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[annielaurie]

What Romney says is not quite what he means, folks. Here are some examples of what he really means,

Romney says, "I won't represent just one party, I'll represent one nation."

But he really means is, "I won't represent just one party, I'll represent big fat greedy corporations."


Romney says, "I ask the American people to vote for love of country."

But what he really means is, "I ask the American people to vote for even fewer jobs, for the loss of hard-won women's rights over the decades, for the repeal of Obamacare so that insurance companies can once again turn away the sick and the poor and those with pre-existing conditions, and for cuts to Social Security for seniors, and last but not least for a voucher system to replace Medicare for seniors, and in general for the loss of the American dream for all time."


Romney says, "Words are cheap. You can say whatever you want to say in a campaign, but what you can achieve - results - those are earned. Those can't be faked."

But what he really means is, "Words are cheap. You can fake whatever you want to say in a campaign, and what you can achieve - results - are the fear and paranoia of an uneducated and unwary public who dislikes the incumbent so much they are willing to take a chance on somebody new. Those are outright lies, of course, but if you're clever enough to make 'em sound real, you'll get the votes on election day."