This could have been posted in Cafe Society I guess, or IMHO, but I think a denate about the U.S. political system will ensue so I will put it here.
In his latest hamfest, “Man of the Year,” Robin Williams plays a comedian who runs for President as an independent and wins.
The movie of course plays on the fantasy that a straight-talking dude recycling other comedians’ jokes could beat all them liars if only he’d get a chance, but the Powers that Be would want to stop him.
My query is this: Suppose this happened and a retard like Robin Williams were to get on the ballot in all 50 states as an independent and actually won enough states that he should be awarded a majority of the electoral votes. Let us assume he is a member of no party and achieved just the minimum support needed to get on the ballots. Would it be automatic that he’d be elected President, or is there a possibility that the electors would still not vote for him, or that the states would refuse to send electors who would vote for him? What are the possible scenarios?
If both major party candidates were found to be sleeping with live boys or dead girls days before the election, maybe. But in reality, it takes an enormous amount of organization and money to run even a semi-incompetent campaign. The presupposition that a comedian would get anything more than a token number of votes is just fantasy. Look at Gary Coleman, or that porn star who ran for governor in California that some year.
But, dealing with the specific scenario you posit, if someone is crazy enough to be an elector for a comedian-slash-political dilettante, they’re crazy enough to end up casting their vote for Mickey Mouse or an interesting piece of toast, resulting in no candidate getting a majority of the vote and throwing the whole election to the House of Representatives.
He would, at minimum, need to have sufficient support to provide each state with electors to the number of two greater than the number of House seats each has. When we vote for president, we do not actually vote for the human, but for the electors put up by his party who will meet in Washington to cast the electoral vote. There are no “independent” electors chosen by the state to participate in the Electoral College. That said, each state has its own rules (mildly circumscribed by the Constitution) regarding how each elector shall be chosen, so there could be some finagling at the state levels.
The movie Man with a Plan is based on (and stars) Fred Tuttle, a Vermont farmer who ran in the Republican primary for Senate against a guy who was perceived to be a rich ‘flatlander’ who just moved to VT in order to grab a senate seat.
He won the primary, but then endorsed Patrick Leahy (D) for the election.
He wasn’t elected, and a small state senate race is a far cry from a presidential race, but we certainly see unexpected, non-experienced yokels find themselves in positions of political power.
You may mock him, but Arnold had a well-organized campaign and has had his toe in political waters for many years before running. And he ran with the backing of a major political party.
Unfortunately, you’re asking for fifty-one answers.
The most basic phenomenon across the fifty states (and I would be willing to bet that Congress plays a similar game in regards to the District of Columbia) is the set of rules deciding how someone can get their party on the ballot, requiring either a huge number of petition signatures or some very large percent of statewide votes in some recent election. This pretty well guarantees that only Republicans and Democrats (along with a tiny number of ancient but politically irrelevant minor parties) will appear on the ballot. (This was also the background to all the fights over allowing Ralph Nader to get on each state’s individual ballot in the last election, as supporters of Nader (with some help from supporters of Bush) campaigned to add Nader to the ballot while Democrats frequently fought to keep Nader off the ballot (both sides fearing/hoping that anyone who would vote for Nader would, if given no other choice, prefer Kerry to Bush).
Wikipedia has a brief section on selecting electors to which I will link rather than copying.
It is possible that, having loaded the dice in favor of the largest parties, no state actually bothers to interfere with the selection process any further, but that is why I note that there are fifty-one possibilities.
Who only had to win a simple plurality of the vote, in a small area of the United States. The Federal Presidential Election is a much more complicated affair, as noted by the OP.
Actually, Tuttle ran for the House (tagline from the movie: “I’ve spent most of my life in the barn. Now I want to spend a little time in the House”), not the Senate, in the movie. He later actually ran for the U.S. Senate IRL and then endorsed Leahy, who won handily.
Abe Simpson: You, President? This is the greatest country in the world. We’ve got a whole system set up to prevent people like you from ever becoming president. Quit your daydreaming, melonhead!
