A strange thought struck me at two o’clock this morning: Imagine that the President gets eaten by a crocodile tomorrow. What happens this close to the election?
There presumably isn’t enough time to re-print ballots. So does the election become a one-horse race that Romney wins by default? Does Biden automatically become the Democratic candidate, and votes for Obama go to Biden? Is there some mechanism for delaying the election?
Electors can choose to vote for whomever they want; barring a massive power play by some insider, Democratic electors would likely be instructed by the DNC to vote for Biden and would likely comply (in the event of a D win). Voters would be made aware that a vote for the Obama line is a vote for this scenario. The VP slot, also being determined by the Electoral College, would be subject to jockeying but would ultimately go to Biden’s preferred choice, assuming he wins the elections. If Romney wins, it’s a moot point, and we have a Horace Greeley scenario where various people receive the meaningless votes.
This is one of the scenarios where having an Electoral College helps the country by allowing us to legally gloss over problems that might otherwise result in a Constitutional crisis. The electors, being allowed to vote for whoever they want, are allowed to act like humans at least to the extent of not voting for the dead guy.
The interesting question is who President Biden’s VP would be between Obama’s death and the election. As per the Twenty-Fifth Amendment, the new VP would have to be confirmed by both houses of Congress, and it might be the case that the person is nominated too close to the election for Congress to vote them up or down before some of the members of each house get replaced.
President Biden, most likely for the next 4 years. And I suppose he could run again in 4 years since he would have only completed a small portion of Obama’s 1st term. Is this right?
OK, so there’s no official procedure in place to deal with the contingency, it just relies on a (totally reasonable) assumption that the electors will vote on party lines.
Could the results then be open to challenge? It seems it might be, since the ballot papers typically list Presidential candidates, not the names of electors. Because of that, the intention of the voters would no longer be clear.
They fire up the ol’ ObamaBot 3000-XL. Just as diplomatic, charismatic, and stocked to the gills with rapid-fire .50 cal tracer rounds.
Correct; someone could be president for a maximum of 10 years.
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Yes it would not count as a term and he could be elected twice.
Although the 25th says the president “shall” appoint a new VP when there is a vacancy, it doesn’t specify a timeframe. Biden could just not bother to do so and wait for the Electoral College to elect him and his VP choice.
It took Ford only 11 days to come up with Nelson Rockefeller. Who’s gonna intervene if Biden decides to procrastinate for a bit?
Yes. The cutoff is that you have to be acting president for more than two years of your predecessor’s term.
And this is the other part of the EC system: The “intention of the voters” was Democratic Party Electors, not Obama/Biden. In the EC system, the people vote in a slate of electors, who then vote for the actual candidates. We’re currently pleased to imagine that the electors will always transmit the will of the people but, frankly, the Founding Fathers were god-damned terrified of ‘the people’ and wanted to protect the workings of government from them as much as possible. This terror is reflected in the Constitution nowhere more explicitly than in the Electoral College.
So. It could come to a court challenge. In theory. In practice, if 2000 didn’t kill the EC this scenario wouldn’t, either.
But this is where it seems to get vague. If you look at a typical ballot paper the voters aren’t asked whether they intend to vote for Democratic or Republican electors. They are asked whether they intend to vote for for Bush/Cheney or Gore/Lieberman electors.
It seems that with Bush dead, precisely who they intended to vote for is open to dispute.
Ah, so that’s how Mitt could fix the economy in 8-10 years. He just needs somebody else to get voted in with him as VP and …
People do vote for Obama/Biden electors or Romney/Ryan electors. And then those electors vote for the President. An Obama/Biden elector can vote for Obama or Biden or Ralph Nader is he wants to*.
*Technically, some states have enacted laws requiring Electors to vote for the candidate they are “supposed” to vote for. But there’s no federal law requiring this and many constitutional experts feel these state laws would not hold up if they were challenged.
OK, technically, you’re possibly in a very legalistic way more right than I am in some states (and you knew that was coming, right?). Twenty-four states have laws to punish faithless electors. Electors are pledged to a candidate (pair) and not a party. You see where this might go except for the fact humans run the system.
They would prosecute someone for voting Romney/Ryan if they were pledged to Obama/Biden, even if the Obama/Biden ticket was technically Biden/??? at that point. That’s what the law was intended for. The law was not intended to try to make electors vote for a dead person. The state prosecutors would recognize that people who voted Obama/Biden (as it said on their ballot) didn’t vote Romney/Ryan for a reason, and therefore shifting their votes to any candidate or candidates other than the ones the Democratic Party ran would be precisely the kind of thing the law was intended to prohibit.
The underlying difficulty here is that political parties don’t exist in the Constitution. Individual candidates and elected officials exist. Nevertheless, we have parties now, and we’ve organized our electoral system around their existence, particularly in the workings of the Electoral College. So, since the law is administered by humans, electors that would otherwise be pledged to Obama/Biden would be pledged to Biden/???, and the system would be allowed to proceed from there.
On a related issue, what happens if an elector dies between Election Day and the day when the Electoral College meets? I assume a replacement elector is designated. By whom? And under what legal authority?
I don’t think the intent of the voters is relevant, constitutionally, in matters of the electoral college. There is no real obligation for the EC to uphold their end of the bargain and vote as they pledged. It is theoretically possible (though very unlikely) for 100% of the voters to vote for Barrack Obama this coming election, and for those electors to turn tail and vote for Mitt Romney. It is the electoral college vote that chooses the president, not our votes.
This comes from the idea of the United States as being a collection of sovereign states; and the electoral college is made up of delegates chosen by those states “in a manner proscribed by law” for the purpose choosing the president.
Electors who don’t vote as pledged are called “Faithless Electors.”
It has actually happened quite a bit in the past, though not enough of them such that it would affect the outcome of the election in any way. This Wikipedia Articlehas a table listing elections where electors haven’t voted as pledged.
All of the above are correct, but I would think that in practical terms, Romney gets a 10 point bounce for the known candidate instead of the DNC’s “we will choose a proven leader” promise. Obama becomes Horace Greeley…
Well, that would obviously depend on the circumstances of Obama’s death. If it’s such as to make him a martyr, it could mean a landslide for the Democrats.
There are crocs in Ohio?
You’d think the last fire in the Cuyahoga River would’ve burned them all up.
