War isn't an apt metaphor

A reader offers a response to the possible postponing an election:

One hundred and fourty years ago the Union held a bitterly fought election in the middle of the Civil War and survived. They had anti-war Democrats wanting peace at any price and the Republicans telling the folks to hang tough. Sound familar?

Now someone is saying that we would be incapable of holding an election because of some terrorist incident that could only seem trivial compared to that war. Come on, let's give the American people some credit!

The notable difference is that the Civil War battles didn't occur within cities upon election day. Same with all the other wars America has faced. How feasible would it have been to hold elections in a city that was suffering aerial bombardment on the day of the election? 9/11 forced the evacuation of several cities (San Francisco, where I would otherwise have been working, for one). The evacuation of cities would skew elections far beyond it's impact on people's decisions about who to vote for. The need to evacuate a city would prevent people from voting, and thereby skew the results. Given the concentration of Americans in really dense cities, such an infringement would be far from trivial. Cities on the scale of Chicago or New York have more people in them than some entire states.

The time to figure out how to give people deprived by a terrorist strike the opportunity to vote would not be after the strike with the outcome of a national election hanging in the balance.