Research Fellow John C. Fortier

Terrorists may have affected the outcome of the Spanish elections in 2004, when they struck with massive train bombings just three days before the election. And don't forget that there was a local election in New York on Sept. 11, 2001. There was no law prescribing what to do, but election officials and a judge halted the election and reran it at a later date.

Of course, it is nearly impossible for terrorists to attack all of our nearly 200,000 polling places across the nation. But consider this chilling and rather low-tech scenario. You awake on Election Day, Nov. 4, 2008, to television reports that three car bombs have gone off at polling stations in different parts of the country. Then a newly released Web video by Osama bin Laden surfaces warning that more attacks will follow. Minutes later, a fourth car bomb goes off in yet another state. What do you do as a voter? What do you do as an election official?

Chaos is the likely outcome of such a scenario. Some jurisdictions might decide to close their polls. Others might stay open but find that voters are not showing up. In America, we don't have a national institution running our elections. At best, we might find that the 50 states and District of Columbia have different responses to the crisis. At worst, we might find that the responses differ from county to county and town to town.

This would all be bad enough for congressional elections, but the problems are magnified on a presidential level. What if some states proceeded with their elections, but others postponed voting? This would mean that some states would vote after others and voters might already know the results in other states. And states that postpone their elections might not choose the same day for a new election. Further, we saw the problems of a drawn-out election in 2000, with questions about whether presidential electors could be selected in time; a terrorist attack would amplify these issues. And would the election be considered valid if, say, only 10 percent of voters showed up, instead of the typical over-50 percent turnout?

Congress should address this issue, but its track record is poor. The summer before the 2004 election, the then-chairman of the newly created Election Assistance Commission, Buster Soaries, asked these same questions. His reward? He had his head handed to him on a plate by both left and right. The left sniffed a Bush administration plot to cancel the election and stay in office. Others, many Republicans included, viewed Soaries's points as signs of unpatriotic weakness. "As Americans, we will never give in to terrorists and postpone our elections."

But an election postponed for a week or two because of a catastrophe does not change the term of the president's office set out by the Constitution. And it is the height of patriotism to plan for such emergencies and to put in place mechanisms that allow us to recover from attacks and hold our democratic elections.

There is no easy solution to this problem, but Congress should take a leading role in at least requiring states to improve polling-place security and to formulate plans in advance to coordinate emergency procedures.

If Sept. 11 taught us one thing, it is not that we will never be attacked again, but that it is important to build strong institutions that can withstand such attacks. Our elections are worth protecting.

John C. Fortier is a research fellow at AEI.