Cecil writes “The Founding Fathers’ chief aim was to forestall the election of crustaceans, protozoans, and other critters lacking the wherewithal to conduct the nation’s business”. But haven’t I heard stories about towns who elected a dog or a cat as mayor? I’ve also heard plenty of urban legends about a non-human (usually a cow) being elected Homecoming Queen. And don’t get me started on the movie Air Bud. But I digress. If a town really has elected a dog as mayor, then let’s compare the exact wording of the laws that allowed that to happen and see how they are different from the laws regarding the office of POTUS.
Oh and BTW, how do we square this with cases where dead people have been elected to public office? Surely the living-challenged lack “the wherewithal to conduct” anything.
I’d thought of those as I read it, but then I realized he used the phrase “to conduct the nation’s business”. I’ve never heard of a non-human in Congress.
Looking for what laws would allow an animal to hold elected office, I found that NPR says the cat who is mayor of a town in Alaska was never actually elected, and isn’t actually mayor.
And the Dog who was mayor of a town in California was only the “honorary” mayor of what isn’t actually a town.
The other articles I’ve found cover animals that only ran for office. Anyone or anything can be a candidate for office if somebody wants to run a campaign; the rules usually only cover who can win. I suspect that if a cat or Mickey Mouse actually got more votes than any other candidate, they would then be found to be ineligible for office.
(Read a story once where a guy ran for President and only after he had won the election did his opponent point out that he couldn’t actually serve (not born in the US).)
I don’t know of any stories where a dead person actually served, though. IIRC, a dead person winning the election just means a new election needs to be held. I believe the loophole here is that they had to be alive to get on the ballot in the first place, but no law says they have to be alive to win the election.
Horace Greeley, the Liberal Republican/Democratic nominee for President in 1872, got what would have been 66 votes in the Electoral College but died before the convening of the College. Most of his EC votes went to other candidates, but three electors still voted for his corpse.
If a majority of the EC wanted to vote for a non-human who otherwise met the legal requirements of being President (a natural born citizen, at least 35 years old, and a resident of the U.S. for at least 14 years), I think the courts would sidestep any challenge, holding it to be a nonjusticiable political question.
Mostly (or entirely?), the laws defining eligibility for lesser offices than POTUS do not limit eligibility to natural-born citizens, so your comparisons would fail there.
Governor Schwarzenegger, for example, isn’t a natural-born American. He can’t be Prez, but he could be a governor.
Once a candidate is on the ballot, and fraud isn’t involved, I doubt that the Court would interfere even if that person didn’t have the basic requirements stated in the Constitution. If that person was elected and then chosen by the Electoral College, that person would become president.
The court might accept a challenge during the ballot qualification process, but not once the election is held.