Arrrgh! “prescribed”, the word is “prescribed”. That word you used means the opposite.
I was just looking at this earlier today for some reason.
The 1845 law establishing Election Day as the Tuesday after the first Monday in November also says that “each State may by law provide for the filling of any vacancy or vacancies that may occur in its college of electors when such college meets to give its electoral vote”.
Your link is flawed. So you have the name of the law?
In Ohio, the remaining electors elect a new elector:
I don’t think the party line part matters. You’re voting for two people: Obama and Biden. If one of them dies, I think it’s still reasonable to think you’re still voting for the other person. That person would then have the right to appoint a VP.
No, there’s no name given, just “Statute II”.
The link should be fine. It’s possible that your browser don’t know how to handle the image file type, though (don’t know why LOC chose that format). You can try right clicking the link and clicking “Save As”. The Photo Viewer built into Windows can open it. Alternately, I think the QuickTime plugin can handle it.
His link works fine, your browser just can’t handle TIFFs.
I used ImageMagick to convert it to a PNG and uploaded it here. If your browser can’t handle PNGs, move out of the 1990s.
Let me get this straight. My browser has trouble handling TIFF files - a format that hasn’t been updated since 1992 - and you’re suggesting the problem is my browser is out of date?
No, I suggested that if your browser had trouble handling PNGs, which Internet Explorer 4.0b1 was (to some extent) capable of, your browser was out-of-date.
Well, in the Horace Greeley case, three of them DID vote for Greeley, even though he was dead. Their votes were disallowed.
BTW, Greeley isn’t quite analogous - he died after the election, and before the Electoral College met.
If he beats Romney in the election.
I’d vote for the crocodile. He had good taste.
Also, if it played out like Greeley, but with Obama’s electors having the majority, it could be a real mess. Only about 1/3 of Greeley’s electors voted for his running mate. Most of them voted for Thomas Hendricks, who wasn’t even seeking the office (he was a prominent Democrat running for Governor of Indiana - the Democrats had backed Liberal Republican Greeley’s nomination that year). Possibly, knowing they didn’t have a majority anyway, they felt free to make a symbolic gesture that wouldn’t matter. However, if we had a situation like this with a majority of electors pledged to a dead candidate, and they scattered their votes, it could easily result in the other candidate getting a plurality, and throw the election to the house.
Nitpick: President, not Acting President. Per the 25th Amendment, Sec. 1: “In case of the removal of the President from office or of his death or resignation, the Vice President shall become President.”
In Then Everything Changed, a series of American political what-ifs, Jeff Greenfield supposes that Richard Pavlick succeeded in killing JFK with a car bomb in December 1960, between election day and the meeting of the Electoral College. LBJ, as Vice President-elect, becomes President under the 20th Amendment, Sec. 3: “If, at the time fixed for the beginning of the term of the President, the President elect shall have died, the Vice President elect shall become President.”
There’s a novel in which this exact scenario plays out. I read it several years ago. The President-elect is riding a horse during a photo-shoot and both fall off a cliff. Many of the electors don’t want the Vice-President elect. I can’t remember the title or the author, which is a shame because it was a really good book. It’s fairly recent, I believe it was written during the 1990’s.
Can anybody help?
I think that might be another Jeff Greenfield novel, The People’s Choice: http://www.amazon.com/Peoples-Choice-Novel-Jeff-Greenfield/dp/0452277051/ref=sr_1_4?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1351349218&sr=1-4&keywords=jeff+greenfield
Yes, that’s it. Thanks, Elendil’s Heir.
The electors vote for a president and vice-president.
IIRC some states, the electors are bound by law to vote for their expressed candidate. Not sure how that law working in the event of the presidential candidate’s death.
It all depends on party loyalty, too. In a moment of tragedy, I suspect the instinct to “pull together” would override any dissent or desire to start playing politics. Nobody wants to come across as playing petty politics in a time of tragedy. If the death happened far enough in advance, then there would be a lot of backroom in-fighting but publicly everyone would support the top echelon of the Deomcratic Party “doing the right thing” whatever they decide.
As for voting, remember that AG Ashcroft lost his election to a dead guy. We presume that was as much the sympathy vote as a reflection on Ashcroft’s appeal…
it’s too late to change voting now. Many, many absentee ballots are already cast.
There’s no reason Obama/Biden votes wouldn’t count. If they win then the normal transition of VP taking over would occur. Then a new VP appointed.
I’m pretty sure dead candidates have stayed on the ballot before. Wasn’t there a Missouri Senator or House Rep that died campaigning a few years ago? I don’t have time to search right now.
This.
In the OP’s scenario, and assuming the Obama/Biden ticket gets a majority of the EC then there would be a HUGE pressure to agree upon a presidential candidate. If even a few voted for another Democrat then Biden might not have an EC majority. The whole Presidential election would be thrown to the House, where Republicans hold a majority of the state delegations. Romney wins in that situation.