Can Kerry still win?

Factual Questions
1

Okay, provisional ballots aside, what’s the legality of this scenario:

George W Bush dies before the Electoral College meets.

My assumptions are as follows: if Bush dies BEFORE the college meets, then whether or not they vote for him, Kerry/Edwards will win, given that Cheney can (at this point) only step up as President until January 20. If Bush dies AFTER the college meets, but before January 20, then the Bush/Cheney ticket still wins, but Cheney automatically becomes president on January 20 (or rather, the day Bush dies).

Is that true? I’m definitely not holding out any hope for a Kerry/Edwards presidency at this point, but it got me thinking. If my assumption is right, then Kerry still has about 45 days to hope Bush keels over?

Who knows for sure?

2

Kerry/Edwards cannot now become president/veep, barring some massive discoveries about the validity of huge numbers of ballots. If GWB dies before the electors meet, the electors will still cast ballots for the Bush/Cheney ticket, and it will be Cheney who is sworn in. If GWB dies after they meet, the exact same thing happens.

3

What about “faithless” electors? Is it legal for a Republican elector to suddenly decide to vote for Kerry?

4

No, that’s not right. The Republican electors who are pledged to vote for Bush aren’t eliminated by the death of the candidate. They could all now cast their votes for Cheney for President, or Bush Sr., or any other Republican who’s eligible for the Presidency. That person would get sworn in in January.

5

No, if Bush dies before the college meets, the electors will vote for Cheney for president, and whoever the RNC tells them to for VP. Less likely but also possible, the RNC will choose someone besides Cheney for the electors to vote for. Fundamentally, though, the electors will vote for whomever they please.

That’s right. Cheney would ascend to the presidency immediately upon Bush’s death. The would choose someone to elect as VP. Cheney could appoint someone as VP-designate to serve the remaining few weeks of the term, and that person would probably be who the EC votes for. But more likely, the vice-presidency would remain vacant until Jan. 20.

6

Well, if Kerry does win somehow, he’d be well on his way to being the first US president to be beatified. =) Supposing that he then manages to make the ‘roadmap’ for peace in the Middle East succeed, he’d qualify to be a saint, provided the Vatican is willing to ignore his pro-choice views, which I strongly suspect they would not.

Unless huge numbers of ballots are disqualified or a Democratic stronghold in OH or FL discovers hundreds of thousands of uncounted votes, Kerry is unlikely to win the electoral vote as it is, and he’s unlikely to pursue challenging the electoral vote because the popular vote went to Bush.

If Bush dies before the EC meets (which is unlikely, of course), I suspect the Republican Party would ask the electors to cast their ballots for someone else. A split EV is unlikely. Also, why do you say that Cheney could only step up as President until January 20? The electors could simply vote for Cheney and make him President.

7

Kerry can still win only if he gets a majority in the Electoral College – an unlikely but not totally impossible event. The counting of provisional and absentee votes in Ohio, for example, could give him that state’s electoral votes and the presidency. Granted, the circumstances that would result in that happening are rather far fetched. (I believe it was reported that he’d have to score something like 80% of the provisional votes.)

What happened Tuesday is that 272 Republicans and 268 Democrats were chosen to together select the next President. (If my numbers are off, kindly correct them, someone.) In the absence of either man dying or going into a terminal coma or something else bizarre, those 272 Republicans will vote for Mr. Bush for President and Mr. Cheney for Vice-President, these results will be read by Mr. Cheney in his capacity as President of the Senate on January 6, 2005, and the two of them will be re-elected.

If Mr. Bush or Mr. Cheney should die or some other reason supervene for not re-electing them (Cheney is discovered on 11/17/04 to have paid Osama Bin Laden to conduct 9/11 in order to get Haliburton more money, to give an ultra-bizarre example), then the 272 Republican electors will (probably) choose the remaining candidate for President and vote freely for a Vice President, presumably consulting with Republican National HQ and among themselves so that they produce a majority for the desired individual.

If the Electoral College does not give a majority to anyone, then the House of Representatives chooses the next President, with one vote to each of the state delegations, 26 needed to win. The Senate likewise chooses the next Vice President.

If Bush died, his electors would not vote for Kerry, but rather (probably) for Cheney.

Your confusion lies in two different things:

Mr. Bush’s first term ends on January 20. If Mr. Cheney were to succeed him now, he would be President until January 20, as Vice President serving out the (almost completed) term of the President.

Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney were also the winning candidates for President for the next term – the one that begins January 20 and ends on the same date in 2009. When people say that Mr. Cheney would only serve until January 20 if Mr. Bush died, they are talking about the current term. Presumably Mr. Cheney would receive the votes of the 272 Republican electors and be inaugurated as President for the new term.

If Mr. Bush is chosen by the Electors and then dies, Mr. Cheney would definitely become President, not merely for the remainder of the current term, but for the new term, under the provisions of Amendment XX, Section 3, first sentence: “If, at the time fixed for the beginning of the term of the President, the President elect shall have died, the Vice President elect shall become President.”

8

Uh… why do you ask?

9

Curiosity.

10

Actually right now the score is 274 Bush, 252 Kerry with 12 votes still to be determined (Iowa and New Mexico).

But Bush leads in both of those states, albeit narrowly.

So the final score will probably be 286-252.

11

The only way that I can think of is if enough Republican electors were to defect. But that’s pretty unlikely.

12

Electors can vote any damn way they want. There is nothing Constitutionally to prevent all 540 voting for Nader, for example. Indeed, there have been “faithless” electors in just about every Presidential election, though only in tiny numbers and never enough to influence the vote, or get mentioned in the press. It’s often done as a symbolic gesture, nothing more.

The only way this could happen in large numbers is if the electors feel the original vote had been tampered with (a plausible scenario during the 2000 election, though it never happened) or if the elected party gets caught committing high crimes and misdemeanors, such as selling weapons and flight school lessons to Osama bin Laden while distributing crack cocaine to schoolchildren and feeding nuns to alligators.

On the other hand, Republicans seem to put up with just about anything their candidate does…

13

To be nitpicky there are just 538 electors.

If there was enough of a political crisis that would warrant electors deviating from their mandate, I would be really worried.

14

Kerry’s ‘best’ chance right now is to somehow gain about 102,000 votes from the Ohio provisional ballots to force an automatic statewide recount. Then things might get interesting again. But calling it a slim chance even is too optimistic for Kerry. There’s a reason he gave concession.

15

Or presumably if he could prove that the voting machines had deliberately produced incorrect results and that the Republicans were behind it…

16

The Republicans wouldn’t have need to be behind it. An innocent error haveing taken place in Bush’s favor would have the same result.
lookie here

Errors in bush’s favor, hmmmm

17

a few thousand here, a few thousand there, and things could get a bit interesting.

18

To prod this thread in one specific direction:

If the Ohio count is completed (still isn’t, as of this moment) and Kerry is found to have squeaked out a victory, can he still become president? I mean, he conceded, but what, exactly, is that concession worth if it’s shown that he won the EC vote?

19

There are a few other threads on this, all with the same determination: a concession is just a formality, and in no way binding.

20

The ONLY thing that matters, at all, is the electoral vote. Kerry can’t be “shown” to have won or lost that until it takes place, which doesn’t happen until after Santa comes.

We can be reasonably certain that Bush will win the electoral college vote, because every state chooses their electors based on a popular vote, and we know, with a great deal of certainty, how the vote went. We further know that faithless electors are a very rare phenomenon.

Now, if something bizarre happens in Ohio and they end up sending Democrats to the EC, then Kerry would most likely win. Kerry’s concession is a formality and has no legal meaning, but it indicates that he has no intention of making any legal challenges to the Ohio vote count, such as what happened in Florida last time.