— — U.S. counterterrorism officials are considering an emergency proposal on legal steps needed to postpone the presidential election in the event of such an attack, Newsweek reported Sunday.
“I think it’s excessive based on what we know,” California Rep. Jane Harman, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said in an interview on CNN’s “Late Edition.”
Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge warned last week that Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda network was planning to attack the United States in an attempt to disrupt the election.
Harman said Ridge’s threat warning “was a failure” because it was based on old information.
Newsweek cited anonymous sources who told it that the Department of Homeland Security asked the Justice Department last week to review what legal steps would be necessary to delay voting if an attack occurred the day before or on Election Day.
The department was asked to review a letter from DeForest Soaries, chairman of the new U.S. Election Assistance Commission, in which he asked Ridge to ask Congress for the authority to postpone the election in the event of an attack, Newsweek reported in its issue published Monday.
The commission was created in 2002 to provide funds to states to replace punch card voting systems and provide other forms of assistance in the conduct of federal elections.
In his letter, Soaries wrote that although the New York Board of Elections suspended primary elections in New York on the day of the September 11, 2001, attacks, “the federal government does not have any agency with statutory authority to cancel and reschedule a federal election.”
Department of Homeland Security spokesman Brian Rochrkasse told the magazine the agency was reviewing the matter “to determine what steps need to be taken to secure the election.”
Republican Rep. Christopher Cox of California, who chairs the House Homeland Security Committee, told CNN that the idea of legislation allowing the election to be postponed was similar to what had already been considered in terms of responding to an attack on Congress.
“These are catastrophic scenarios. Nobody expects them to happen,” he said. “But we are now preparing for all these eventualities.”
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