Reader David Smith reports that many people did leave work on September 11, because they wanted to be home, though that didn’t seem to keep them away from the polls:
I live in Cambridge, work in Boston, run a small company, and was at my desk on 9/11. I remember the attacks clearly — we turned on the office television. People were in quiet shock. Around 10:30 people started leaving their offices — I could see them from my fifth floor window, on the streets, heading for subways and trains. There was a sense that we had no idea what would happen yet, and it seemed better to be home with loved ones and not in large buildings. Just because we did not know what better thing to do.
Perhaps people voted on their way home. Perhaps they voted in the morning before they knew the news of 9/11. (Voting is heavily clustered before 9 and after 5.) Perhaps they voted on a minor local issue because it was all such a shock that we could not interpret what to do next, and the minds were made up.
He also suggests that given the 9/11 shock, people won’t be as shocked next time, and there’d be still less disruption of the election (at least in those places that aren’t directly attacked):
All those facts would be different if, God forbid, a terrorist attack hit a day or two before the election. We are smarter now, wiser, we have seen things we wished not to see. We have had the Spanish 3/11 and its consequences. There would, in short, be not the same element of emotional shock. And so the Boston (or other) 9/11 voting experience is, in my view, not relevant to whether an election should be postponed in the event the unthinkable occurs.
May well be so.
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