Yeah, this is where it gets complicated. There might need to be a Supreme Court ruling before this is allowed to stand.
The Supreme Court didn’t rule on the outcome of the election. They ruled on whether a recount could continue past the federally-established deadline. This has the side effect of causing Bush to win, but at no point did the Court “award” the presidency to Bush, nor does it follow that if they had ruled differently that Gore would have become president.
It almost certainly would not have – multiple recounts after it was all over, done by newspapers and outside orgs, all showed Bush still winning. The most likely effect of the SC was to eliminate another month or two of ballot counting that would have given the same result in the end.
Knowing how the decision has been perceived ever since, it might have been best to let it go on anyway.
Surely the answer to the OP is rather straightforward and obvious? Al Gore would have been elected the 43rd President of the United States. That’s it. It’s how the system works.
[QUOTE=Constitution]
The Congress may determine the Time of choosing the Electors, and the Day on which they shall give their Votes; which Day shall be the same throughout the United States.
[/QUOTE]
Congress has set the day of"choosing" the electors to be general election day. Minnesota (like 48 other states) says that the winner of the state’s popular vote gets his slate of electors appointed. That slate is set in advance.
I would argue that a replacement on the day of the electoral college would constitute a separate choice of an elector in violation of the federal law and the constitution.
Not really. The bottom line is that there are laws in many states which require electors to vote for the candidate they’re pledged to and invalidate their votes if they don’t do so. But the constitutionality of these laws haven’t been determined.
So it’s an open question. If three electors pledged to Bush had decided to vote for Gore, their votes might not have counted. Or they might have.
If Ralph Nader hadn’t run in that election you would have had President Gore.
And the one time there was a real dispute over the validity of electoral votes, it was not handled especially well.
The question as posed by the OP should have involved four electors switching, not three.
If three electors would have switched, the result would have been Gore 269, Bush 268, and one blank vote. To be elected, a candidate must receive a majority of the electors appointed, not of the votes cast. So there would have been no election, and the House of Representatives, voting by state, would have had to choose between Bush and Gore.
Interesting. So 270 is still the magic number then.
This was a pretty well known small deal at the time. Some sample coverage:
Will someone please put this canard to rest? While technically true, it’s also true that if Gore had run a better campaign, you would have had President Gore. If Democrats had been better at getting out the vote, you would have had President Gore. If there hadn’t been a war on, you’d have had President Gore. In any number of hypothetical situations, the results would have been different.
Some voters preferred Nader over Gore. Rather a larger number preferred Bush over Gore. Another larger number chose not to vote at all. All of these factors contributed to Bush’s win Singling out Nader and voters who voted their conscience for blame may be satisfying, but it’s not accurate in that it’s only a small part of the story.
That was one ugly election, all around.