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July 13, 2004
Vol. 7 No. 28
In this
issue:
1. Terror on the Ballot
2. Pouncing on the Bounce
3. Very Important VoIP
4. Quick Hits
5. New at Reason Online -
Lights, Camera, Election
6. News and
Events
When the Department of Homeland Security contemplates extending federal authority so as to postpone a presidential election, fundamental constitutional issues come quickly into play. Elections, even federal ones, are essentially state responsibilities. That someone at the DHS suddenly noticed this situation is scant reason to consider any change in the American democratic process.
The precise concerns of anti-terrorism officials remain sketchy, but are easy enough to unpack. First, in the event of a terror attack directed at the electoral process in several or even a single state, it is difficult to imagine that all 50 state election boards would insist on holding to the original election date. A postponement would be costly and confusing, but state officials would not willfully allow the vote to be tainted, especially after what happened in Florida in 2000.
So Homeland Security cannot be principally concerned about the integrity of the voting process in the event of an actual attack. The present state-based system should work fine. There is every reason to believe the states will respond to any national emergency in a responsible manner; the voting public would insist on it.
What federal anti-terror officials must truly worry about is a situation in which they have good intelligence that a particular attack is scheduled to occur on or near Election Day. In such a situation, the feds would indeed have to go to each state election board and convince it to postpone voting, if federal officials believed that postponing voting could somehow allow them to thwart the attack. That does sound like a daunting task, and is doubtless what motivates the desire for some sort of federal legislation allowing the states to be bypassed. The latter would be much easier. This gets us to the crux of the matter.
What would a pre-emptive federal decision to postpone the presidential election sound like? Unfortunately, they would probably sound a lot like the announcements raising the terror-alert level from one color-code to another -- scary, ominous, and very, very vague. That just would not be good enough for such a serious matter. Nothing is as easy to slap together as a tendentious "intelligence finding."
This first presidential election in the terror age surely puts a great strain on the feds. The Secret Service alone has seen its workload at least double in recent weeks, with the addition of at least two more high-value targets in need of protection. More importantly, the security bubbles around the candidates must be in constant motion toward public, semi-open places, all of which must be swept clean. Leave things to the security agencies and the campaign would be limited to a few square blocks along Pennsylvania Avenue with no events ever taking place at a pre-set time. Of course to the security people, moving the election date sounds like a reasonable idea.
But as well intentioned as the motivation might be, postponing the election just sounds decidedly un-American.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5411741/site/newsweek/
Anyone looking for a big Democratic bounce from John Kerry's selection of John Edwards has thus far been disappointed. That's to be expected: Edwards' role is not to woo middle-of-the-road voters away from Bush. Rather, Edwards is supposed to excite and grow the Democratic base so that it will turn out and vote in large numbers. It's too early to tell if Edwards will do that, but nothing so far indicates that he'll fail, either.
Just as George W. Bush now seeks to excite his cultural-conservative base by talking up gay marriage, Kerry will turn to his base among public-sector unions and urban minorities to make the case that those voters have a big stake in this election. Of all the possible choices for veep, Edwards has the best shot at going into the African-American community as Kerry's surrogate and coming away with votes. Doesn't mean that he will, of course, but Kerry has little chance to excite these voters on his own.
So, although polls of likely voters will supply valuable information about voter trends and inclinations, the presidential election may turn on which side can move the most bodies from the category of "eligible voter" into the category of "likely voter."
http://apnews.myway.com/article/20040712/D83P5SP80.html
Indications are that the next president will sign into law a massive re-working of the nation's telecom laws, a result of voice over Internet protocol utterly destroying the existing regulatory system. In a matter of a few years VoIP has grabbed a sizable chunk of business telephony. Every day, it eats away at the most profitable part of residential service: upper-income customers who order lots of services such as Call Waiting.
Together the business/suburban ratepayers subsidize the rural/urban telecom users in a very deliberate system that regulators and politicians have instituted over the years. But even Congress understands that the system is about to lose its revenue source as users bail to the unregulated VoIP alternative.
Last week Rep. Edolphus Towns (D-N.Y.) laid out what state regulators have feared since VoIP appeared on the scene: That as the consumers who pay artificially high prices flee to VoIP, the price of basic, analog residential telephone service will have to increase. Congress can either stand by and let that happen, or try to cobble together some subsidy system that is able to co-exist with VoIP.
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1620831,00.asp
Quote of the Week
"A lot of people think being a redneck has got something to do with prejudice, but it doesn't. It's a lifestyle." -- Susan Hannah on her plans to attend this year's Redneck Games.
http://www.macon.com/mld/macon/news/local/9127733.htm
Blog, Blog, Blog
If bloggers get convention credentials, just how outside-the-mainstream can they possibly be? Besides, newspapers and magazines long ago used proto-blog formats to round-up little tidbits of convention runoff for the truly hapless reader.
http://www.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2004/7/9/215703.shtml
The Unknown Giant
ARM is huge in cell phones and digital cameras and keeps getting bigger in more markets, and no one has ever heard of the company.
http://asia.cnet.com/newstech/perspectives/0,39001148,39186464,00.htm
Princely Stooge
The Prince of Wales compares nanotech to thalidomide and at least a few people note he is a dolt.
http://news.scotsman.com/scitech.cfm?id=798352004
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