Election Law @ Moritz has been hosting a running colloquy about the impact on the election of Hurricane Sandy.
As Hurricane Sandy was bearing down on the Eastern Seaboard, a number of us at Election Law @ Moritz, and many of our friends and associates in the larger election administration community, began thinking about the hurricane’s potential impact on this year’s election. After EL@M published an initial post concerning the most relevant background law, EL@M’s Ned Foley and The Bipartisan Policy Center’s John Fortier decided to undertake a running electronic colloquy concerning issues that the storm raised. This colloquy, which has now also included Joshua Douglas of the University of Kentucky and EL@M’s David Stebenne, can be accessed here.
It is also worth noting that the underlying issues concerning the impact of natural disasters and other emergencies are the subject of two previous EL@M efforts, one in 2004, and a second in 2008. Specifically, in 2004, we collected information about the emergency authority over elections of 25 critical states. Then in 2008, we created an interactive map of that year’s battleground states, one of the features of which was the emergency authority that those states had over elections. With the critical caveat that the raw data here has not been updated since their postings in 2008 and 2004, these two collections continue to add value to the discussion. Similarly, this 2004 Congressional Research Service report also is an important previous collection of information about state laws concerning emergency election postponement.