Ridge feeds the jitters.

Byline: The Register-Guard

Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge, whose color-coded terror alerts periodically stoke Americans' anxieties, has found another way to send the needle on the national worry meter into the red zone. He recently asked the Department of Justice to study what might happen if a terrorist attack caused the presidential election to be postponed. He could have avoided raising alarm, and suspicion, by turning first to the Constitution.

Ridge is paid to be vigilant, maybe even a bit paranoid. Preventing and preparing for terrorist attacks requires that he ask "what if?" questions. Yet asking such questions clumsily, or of the wrong people, can make people needlessly nervous. That was the result when Ridge sought to find out what would happen if an event on the scale of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks occurred on Election Day.

Actually, Sept. 11, 2001, was an election day in New York City. Municipal elections officials postponed the voting. Noting that fact, DeForrest Soaries Jr., chairman of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, said in a letter to Ridge that "the federal government has no agency that has the statutory authority to cancel and reschedule a federal election."

Ridge forwarded Soaries' letter to the Department of Justice's Office of Legal Counsel, requesting that it analyze what would be needed to permit the postponement of a presidential election.

In fact, an agency with authority to set presidential election dates does exist. It's called Congress.

Article 2, Section 1 of the Constitution states that "The Congress may determine the time of choosing the (presidential) electors, and the day on which they shall give their votes, which day shall be the same throughout the United States." Since 1845, that day has been the first Tuesday following the first Monday in November. The Constitution also gives the states the authority to set election dates for U.S. senators and representatives, subject to congressional review. House members have been elected on the same date as the president since 1875, and senators on the same date since 1914.

If Congress runs out of other things to do, it might consider the circumstances under which a federal election would be postponed. Lawmakers should bear in mind, however, that the United States successfully held presidential elections on schedule during previous times of national emergency, including the Civil War. They should also bear in mind that the responsibility for conducting elections belongs to the states, and that most states could hold elections as planned even if natural or man-made catastrophes struck a few places in the country.

What's more, the message that the United States would send by tinkering with the election date would have to be considered. A terrorist strike on or near Election Day would presumably be timed to interrupt the democratic process. A refusal to allow the process to be disrupted would deny the attackers one of their primary aims. The political and psychological benefits of allowing the basic machinery of self-government to continue on track, in defiance of those seeking to derail it, would be substantial.

Ridge should have forwarded Soaries' letter to Congress, not the Department of Justice. Or perhaps he should have reminded Soaries that the Election Assistance Commission was created by Congress, not the Department of Homeland Security.

Or maybe Ridge should have realized that he would spread ripples of alarm by even raising the possibility of canceling or postponing the presidential election, and quietly slipped Soaries' letter into a drawer.