A Showcase of Electoral Unpreparedness

This election, I will not be voting for Barack Obama.
To be fair, I won’t be voting at all. Before I arouse the wrath of slogan-wielding youth vote activists, let me say that it’s not out of any apathy on my part, but rather due to what Harvard University officials implicitly deemed an “act of God”—the East Coast’s own “frankenstorm,” Hurricane Sandy.
As I write, more than 3.7 million households along the East Coast are without electricity; among them is the Manhattan Board of Elections. Currently, the New York City-area voters’ hotline is entirely out of service, and a spokesperson for the Board of Elections stated that the entire computer system is down due to outages resulting from the hurricane. While most states are due to have power restored in time for Election Day, the hurricane might have made a lasting impact on one of the major arenas of the presidential election, early voting.
Early voting has played a significant role in the presidential election in years past, and 2012 is expected to preserve that trend. According to a George Mason University study, more than 31.7 million voters cast their ballots early in 2008, whether in-person or by mail via absentee ballot. As of November 2, close to 25 million ballots had already been cast in the presidential election.
But what about those early voters impacted by Hurricane Sandy? In North Carolina, Virginia, West Virginia, Maryland, and the District of Columbia, in-person early voting in some counties was suspended for as long as 48 hours following the hurricane. In many states still without power, election officials are working overtime to ensure that physical polling stations will be up and running in time for Election Day.
Those who planned on voting absentee and had yet to receive their ballots before the storm hit are simply out of luck. As my repeated calls to the Manhattan Board of Elections went unreturned, the most significant help I could receive for my plight was the constant refrain: “our entire computer system is down.” Apparently all that’s standing between me and my constitutional right to vote is a long enough extension cord to reach the nearest emergency generator.
It’s difficult to tell at this juncture how many would-be absentee voters have been deterred by Sandy. The HPR’s calls to the New York Board of Elections went unreturned, and no statistics have currently been published about the number of people requesting absentee ballots who have been unable to receive them. It’s also possible that voter turnout could be affected by the storm, as many New Jersey polling stations will be replaced by military vehicles and what the state’s lieutenant governor called “a big sign saying ‘Vote Here.’” Some New York City voting sites may simply be tents hooked up to a generator.
Still, the voting challenges presented by the hurricane are mitigated by the fact that the three states most heavily-hit by the storm, New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut, are all decidedly likely to go blue. At worst, the storm could reduce the president’s share of the popular vote, but it’s unlikely to have an impact on his electoral votes.
But what if Sandy had been a more destructive storm? Or what if it had made landfall a few days closer to the election? It’s not particularly comforting to think of the fragility of the logistical nightmare that is the United States’ national elections. While Sandy is unlikely to have caused a catastrophic electoral disturbance, it’s interesting to think what might have been had the hurricane been on the scale of 2005’s Katrina. As Maya Roy wrote in 2007, Hurricane Katrina would have radically changed the face of Louisiana politics, disenfranchising urban Democratic voters in New Orleans and giving way to a Republican majority in the northern counties of the state. Instead, then-Governor Kathleen Blanco postponed all of 2005’s remaining elections as well as the primary and general elections scheduled for early 2006 to accommodate the electoral needs of displaced voters.
Electoral officials currently scrambling to cope with Sandy don’t have the luxury of time permitted the Gulf states. From the perspective of those states currently affected, a further challenge comes in the form of the upcoming election being a national, rather than local, one. The administration of the presidential election is barely touched on in the Constitution, but one of the only provisions is that Congress “may determine the time of [choosing] the Electors, and the Day on which they shall give their Votes; which Day shall be the same throughout the United States.” Postponing the election to accommodate those who evacuated or are unable to access early voting mechanisms would require national coordination from a Congress currently in recess. In short, even should Congress have wished to postpone the election, it would likely have not had the opportunity to do so.
Though Sandy has disenfranchised a few unhappy voters, myself included, the storm was not destructive enough to derail the presidential election. As a cautionary tale, however, Sandy has much to show us about our national unpreparedness to deal with a disruption of our elections. Currently, the United States has no federal contingencies to deal with electoral obstruction, whether by national disaster or acts of terrorism. With a right as fundamental as the people’s right to choose their president, it’s unwise to leave so much up to chance.
 
Photo Credit: David Shankbone