SPECIAL WEATHER ADVISORY

[melannen]

MY FELLOW EAST COAST AMERICAN VOTERS

(who have not already been successfully blocked by those undemocratic fuckers* who are messing with registrations)

VOTE AS EARLY AS YOU CAN.

Normally I'm a bit of an early voting skeptic, but you guys remember the derecho, right? AFAIK (and I'm going in as an election judge starting tomorrow, so you'd think I would know) my election board's total disaster-zone-voting-plan is "if there's an ice storm on election day, the governor might extend voting hours, at which point you open this sealed package which you have never seen before and have not been trained on."

Hopefully they will come up with something better within the next few days, but considering their general level of flexibility and logistical genius? Um. And I can tell you right now they don't have enough generators for all of the normal voting locations.

If we have the same sort of clusterfuck* we had with the derecho, which is sounding like a distinct possibility, and then you put the clusterfuck this election was already going to be on top of it...

You will be very, very glad to have already voted before the worst of the storm hits, if you were able to vote before the worst of the storm hit.


*yes, I am still watching The Thick Of It! I even posted a story to ttoi_kinkmeme. I bet you couldn't possibly guess which one was me.

Comments

[alexseanchai]

Early voting: not a thing here.

I hope any problems caused by the storm will be resolved before Election Day. And failing that, they bloody well better provide more voting opportunity as soon as the problems are resolved.

[melannen]

I think getting late voting (beyond just extended hours) is very, very, *very* unlikely, because that would create all sorts of opportunities for the election to be challenged and drawn out into an epic legal battle. Maybe if whole towns are actually flattened and/or underwater, which let us hope does not happen for its own sake. But if it's just coastal flooding, massive power outages and blocked roads, I suspect they will attempt to continue as scheduled (of course, that will *also* lead to all sorts of opportunities for challenges due to irregularities.)

If the East Coast is a major disaster zone come Tuesday after next, in fact, I think the only way to avoid huge legal battles afterward would be to delay voting for the entire country, and that would still be a clusterfuck (plus I think not legally possible.)

...yeah, let's just hope everything's fixed by election day. Or at least that Obama has a big enough lead to win even without votes from those states, which will at least confine the clusterfuck to those states.

[lannamichaels]

(plus I think not legally possible.)

Definitely not constitutionally.

Although I wonder if it might be possible to extend it for the entire country. You can't change election day itself, but I wonder what the laws are for extensions, which probably vary by location and even lawyer. Elections are done locally, but could Congress (legally, not in the real world) pass a law to extend for a week? This Congress would never do that, but *could* they do that?

[melannen]

From what I was reading this afternoon (which was admittedly just a couple of blog posts) it would probably end up being done state-by-state by governors, and the chance of getting unaffected governors to agree is fairly low. I don't know if Congress could do it - but I suspect if they tried there would be a fuss about states' rights.