Can terrorists postpone election?

• Position: Your Life

Though the law is somewhat ambiguous on the subject, the power to postpone November's presidential election as a result of terrorist threat or attack lies mostly with individual states, maintains University at Buffalo (N.Y.) School of Law professor James Gardner. "The U.S. Constitution explicitly delegates the authority to conduct presidential election to the states.

"It's clear that states could create a procedure in advance that would include a provision for postponing an election, for designating particular officials to decide whether or not an election has to be postponed, and for setting out procedures for rescheduling the election.

"I don't think there would be a terrorist attack that can disrupt the entire presidential election everywhere in the country," he adds. "So, necessarily, what we're talking about is a piece of the election being disrupted, within a particular state, and what would be the ramifications of that."

There is precedent supporting a congressional decision to postpone the election, Gardner points out. "Although the Constitution does not appear to give Congress a great deal of regulatory authority over presidential elections, in fact the Supreme Court has consistently interpreted the Constitution to give Congress implicit...