In Washington State, a losing political candidate is asking for an election result to be overturned on fraud charges. Legally how many states will allow elected officials to either not be seated or forced to be in an rerun election? In those that do allow this, how often does it happen? Is there any way elections for President or the U.S. Congress to be set aside?
Congress can choose not to seat someone elected to it. It can’t, to my knowledge, overturn an election and can’t do anything at all about state elections. Neither can the president.
Can state legislatures legally overturn an election? Fraud is normally a matter for the courts, but it’s possible that a legislature could rule on an election to it.
The election in your link is for a judgeship, so I’m betting that only courts could rule on that.
Elections do get overturned for fraud, although it’s rare and the fraudulent behavior has to be pretty blatant.
In theory electors in the Electoral College can vote for anyone they want and need not vote for the person their state elected in a presidential election.
In practice this varies as different states have different rules about what their electors must do (some demand they vote for the person elected, some insist they only have to cast their first vote for the person elected and some, I believe, can vote for anyone they please).
It is highly unusual for anyone to overturn the results of any election, even when fraud can be conclusively proven. Courts are unwilling to get involved. I doubt there have been a half dozen cases in all of US history.
In the quoted article, it’s even more unlikely – the charge is that the broke election laws, which, if true, will result in a fine for those who broke them. The laws do not have the option to overturn the results in the ballot box.
And remember, there are 51 sets of election laws. Stuff that is illegal in one state may be legal in another. For example, in Washington during the 2004 Gubernatorial Election, the Republican won but the Democrats requested a hand recount. In heavily Democrat King County, the election workers were physically marking the ballots and were caught doing it. What?!!! But ballots are sancrosanct and it is illegal to mark on them right? Not in Washington. The poll worker can mark on them to clarify the voter’s intent for the machines.
Question: There were quite a few problems with ballots in other ways and and the Democrat won by 129 votes. Did she win by fraud when one or more Democrats in King County gave her votes by marking the ballots for her despite “voter intent” and should the election be overturned?
Answer: The Democrat won by 133 votes when 4 votes for the Republican was thrown out.
In Canada, a judicial recount for a federal election is automatically ordered in a riding where the margin of victory is less than 0.1% (one one-thousandth) of the votes cast. In cases where the margin is is wider but still small (I forget the exact figure), any elector can request a recount. The main task is making sure all the figures add up (poll clerks count the ballots in every “poll” – I forget the real word for this; this is what we party mooks call it; every riding is divided into around two hundred of them – and the number of votes has to tally with the number of ballots cast and the number of rejected ballots) and looking over the rejected ballots to see if any were improperly rejected when they do in fact indicate a clear vote and have no identifying marks on them.
In the last federal election, three requested and two automatic judicial recounts were held. Four confirmed the announced result, but in the riding of Brossard–La Prairie in suburban Montreal, the Bloc candidate who had been declared the victor was found to have lost to the Liberal by 69 votes.
As for the more exotic types of contested elections, Elections Canada says:
Also, if there is a tie, a new election is held in that riding.
This doesn’t overturn the election. The vote by the Electoral College is the election.
Mmm, your doubts are misplaced. In the United States House of Representatives alone, through 2002, there have been 601 contested elections, and in 128 (21%) of them, the contestant has won. (See Table 3 on page 120.)
Either House of Congress can overturn an election, by seating the contestant in place of the contestee, or it can determine that an election was so flawed that nobody won and declare the seat vacant (resulting in a new election). Absent an election contest, Congress must seat any member-elect who meets the Constitutional requirements of age, citizenship, and residence.
Although the title of that article goes through 2002, it concentrates almost entirely on the 19th century and notes that the particular nonsense that went on during Reconstruction stopped in the 20th century.
And the controlling law today is not the same as it was then.
The problem in this discussion is the meaning of the words “contested” and “overturn.” The usual meaning of overturn is taking a settled election and reversing the outcome. A contested election is one that is not settled. But I can’t figure out where the line is and who is making that distinction when. Obviously, many elections are contested for a multitude of reasons. However, very few elections today are ever decided by courts because of fraud.
The OP was asking about elections overturned for fraud, not about elections with recounts which happened to reverse a previous count. That is what “contested” usually refers to.
So what? RealityChuck made an assertion that it was “highly unusual for anyone to overturn the results of any election” and that he doubted “that there have been a half dozen cases in all of US history”, and I pointed out that that isn’t true. Even if you count only overturns due to fraud, it isn’t true.
It is extremely rare for a Court to overturn the results of an election, regardless of how much election fraud was proven. Generally, the most serious action they take is to order a new election.
(I suppose that could be considered ‘overturning’ the original election. But it’s more like ‘nullifying’ the original election – they don’t declare a winner, just a ‘do-over’, where the voters get to decide again.)
We’ve just had a case in the U.K. Briefly, the candidate, Mr Woolas, made some false campaign statements about another candidate which he knew were untrue. BBC story here.
A recount does not overturn the results – the election isn’t official until the recount is over.
The case in the OP was talking about, the candidate is not asking for a recount; he’s asking that the results be thrown out. This doesn’t happen. The table you quote only show 11 cases where the seat was declared vacant (which is what the candidate wants). While that’s more than my estimate, I was clearly in the ballpark.
That’s 11 percent of 601 cases, or 66 cases.