Promiscuous Voting

Campus Report ^ | November 03, 2008 | Irene Warren

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Promiscuous Voting

by: Irene Warren, November 03, 2008

With the 2008 Presidential Election drawing near to a close, political think tanks are proposing new election laws to deter election fraud and to prepare the state and federal governments in guiding an election during a time of catastrophe.

In recent years, the U.S. election system has fallen prey to chaos. “Successfully managing an ordinary presidential election requires an enormous amount of preparation and planning, read an AEI October 2008 events news brief. “Natural and man-made disasters alike have caused massive administrative disruptions to elections in recent years in states like Louisiana, with Hurricanes Katrina and Gustav, and New York, with the attacks of September 11. Numerous legal questions arise in the face of disaster: If a catastrophe required closing polling places in a specific city or state on Election Day, could that state legally reschedule the federal election? How would the Constitution or federal law handle the incapacitation, or federal law handle the presidential or vice-presidential candidates in a terrorist attack?” These questions were just a few of the many questions which politicians and legal scholars debated on October 23.

“It is clear that the current system created in 1974, the first used in 1976, and fundamentally unchanged since, including the law [on] spending limits in the primary and general election campaigns-is utterly broken,” CBS election analyst Norman J. Ornstein noted in a recent article published by AEI. Ornstein believes the current election system is in great need of reform.......