I have written this piece for The Daily Beast. It begins:
The destruction wrought by superstorm Sandy has been horrific enough, but if there’s anything to be grateful for, it’s the storm’s timing. If Sandy had hit just one week later, we’d be facing a constitutional crisis. As it is, there is plenty of speculation on the possible effects of the storm on the Nov. 6 election. There are multiple and conflicting answers to the concerns being raised—from political to statutory to constitutional—but they all obscure a larger and more troubling truth: There is absolutely no reason for us to be in this situation in the first place.
It concludes:
Worst of all for disaster planning, legislatures are passing election reforms on party-line votes. With the exception of Rhode Island, the tough new voter-ID laws have been favored almost exclusively by Republicans and opposed almost exclusively by Democrats. Election Day Registration, which recently passed in California, is supported by Democrats and opposed by Republicans. In short, there has been no bipartisan space for election reform in the state, and there’s no reason to think Congress would do any better.
But bipartisanship is exactly what is needed now, just like it is needed to deal with contingency plans if the House of Representatives were hit by a terrorist attack (another issue Congress has irresponsibly ignored aside from holding hearings). Some things are just too big for partisan bickering.
At the end of my book The Voting Wars, I point out how Japan’s reaction to the devastating 2011 tsunami—raising its sea walls—was simply what humans often do: responding to the last disaster. But Congress hasn’t even done that much. When it comes to planning for catastrophes near election time, we’ve had at least two major disasters in the past decade, not to mention the Florida debacle—and through it all Congress has sat on its hands. Will it keep sitting until it’s too late?