On February 12, just a few hours before the polls closed in a hotly contested Presidential primary, a cold front coated Northern Virginia’s roads with a sheen of dangerous ice. The Mixing Bowl, the massive system of flyovers and ramps where the Beltway and Shirley Highway intersect, was the most seriously impacted point: as a result, an untold number of commuters couldn’t make it to their polling places before the 7 PM deadline. Indignation erupted on the Internets, with outraged demands to know why Virginia didn’t follow Maryland’s lead and extend voting hours.

The problem, as a blogger with the great pseudonym of “Not A.E. Dick Howard” commented, is this: “. . . Maryland’s polls were kept open by operation of Maryland law at the order of a Maryland circuit judge. There is no parallel provision in Virginia law allowing the Virginia State Board of Elections, or the Governor of Virginia, to extend voting hours.”

Last week, the Governor stepped into the breach. While the deadline for mere legislators to propose a bill during this session has long since passed, under the Constitution of Virginia, His Excellency can send “such measures as he may deem expedient” down to the House and/or Senate any time the mood strikes him during the session. That’s what he did last week: he submitted a measure that was introduced in the Senate as SB 796 and in the House as HB 1577, permitting a court to extend voting hours in an officially declared emergency or in other situations that interfered with the voting process.

The proposal is certain to raise a lot of questions. It would permit extended voting hours in an affected “region,” potentially giving that region a leg up in turnout. Given Virginia’s growing political diversity, this could make a huge difference in tight races: in 2006 Jim Webb carried the entire state by around 9,300 votes, solely on the basis of huge margins in Northern Virginia (he carried my district alone by 12,000 votes). If it had rained earlier that day in a Republican corner of the state, and a judge had extended voting hours in that region to permit flooded-out voters to get to the polls, could it have affected the outcome?

But addressing the regional bias issue by extending voting hours statewide on the basis of conditions in one part of the state would pose problems of its own. One would be the impact on poll workers, those civic-minded men and women who staff the precincts for Election Day shifts that can run longer than 15 hours. As an article over the weekend points out, these workers, whose median age is in the 70s, already are stressed out due to heavy turnout and other demands of the job. Keeping the polls open for a couple of hours in Pennington Gap (which is west of Detroit), and requiring poll workers there and in other far-flung corners of Virginia to work late into the night, because of a snowstorm in NOVA, would be problematic.

So what’s the answer? You got me. I have a feeling we won’t come up with a solution in the next 10 days.