Ballot security

War on terror | Election returns from Afghanistan to Australia suggest a terror-free Nov. 2 is still possible | Priya Abraham, Mindy Belz

U.S. Sen. Mark Dayton (D-Minn.) is so worried about a possible pre–Election Day terror attack that he announced on Oct. 12 that he was closing his Capitol Hill office until after Nov. 2. Mr. Dayton said he made the decision after digesting a classified memo available to all senators, yet other lawmakers weren't following his lead.

If threats of election attacks and disruptions are real, they have not manifested themselves in other terror-prone polling venues. Voters cast ballots this month in Afghanistan, the home of al-Qaeda, and in Australia, the second-largest U.S. coalition member in Iraq after Great Britain, all without major incident. Those polls opened in a week one Arab journalist, Arabiya television director Abd al-Rahman al-Rashed, dubbed the "week the world map was drenched in blood" after bombers struck in two sites in Pakistan, the Indonesian embassy in Paris, downtown Algiers, and at a resort on Egypt's Sinai Peninsula.