Okay, the boyfriend and I were talking a couple days ago about the presidential race and the question came up, what if, just before the election, one of the major candidates were to up and die?
Let’s say the Man from the Grassy Knoll is hiding out in front of the governor’s mansion in Austin and shoots ole Dubya as he’s coming out to get the morning paper on Nov. 1st.
Would Cheny move into the #1 spot? Could Dubya’s name be taken off the ballot this close to the election? Could the Republican National Committee get together and slip in someone else?
There have been several cases of dead people running for office.
The current case is in Missouri. Their Governor Carnahan was running for the Senate, but recently died. The ballots are ready so it is to late to remove his name.
The new governor says that if Carnahan wins, he will appoint Carnahan’s widow to the position. Presumably, they will drag Carnahan’s body to DC to take the oath of office.
I wondered about this too. All I can offer is a WAG on what happens.
It is too late to remove a name from the ballot as they’ve already been printed and distributed.
To get on a presidential ballot requires a certain number of signatures (250,000?).
Unless the party whose candidate died can produce signatures putting (say) Cheney on the ballot I don’t know that he’d be allowed to run as a presidential candidate.
Even if #3 is correct and even if the party could produce the signatures to get Cheney on the ballot you run into problem #1 again.
There is always a place to write-in a candidate. My guess is the party would go nuts trying to educate the voters to use this option. Make counting them hell however.
At a guess I’d say the death of one of the candidates would be the end of that party’s hopes for winning the presidential election.
Manhattan, thanks for the link, but my question is slightly different.
What if the candidate dies before the election, yet too late to change the ballots? Surely there’s a cut off time when the ballots cannot be changed. If either of the major candidates dies within that time, what happens? Is there any precedence for this?
Jeff_42, thanks for your thoughts, I think you’re right, that party would suddenly be running a dead person for office.
If one of the presidential candidates passed away between now (10/31) and Election Day (11/7), I don’t think any state, except very small ones like Vermont or Wyoming, would be able to change their ballots.
We’d all vote for whomever was listed even if the candidate were dead. Presumably, the party of the deceased candidate would nominate a new candidate and the electors would vote for that person.
The electors can vote for whomever they please. They usually don’t, but they obviously can.
I’m turning 35 in December. They could vote for me!
Don’t forget, technically speaking the candidates we are voting for are the Presidential Electors, not the Presidential contenders. If one of the contenders died before the election the Electors pledged to him would still be on the ballot, and if they win, could cast their Electoral votes for whomever they wish. Presumably, if they have any party loyalty, they would agree among themselves to all choose the same replacement candidate, probably after seeking a consensus from national party leaders.
The short answer is, we’d elect electors, who would in turn vote for a replacement candidate.
The long answer is, who knows. Being from Missouri, this has a certain current affairs interest for me. I just re-read a novel from CNN political commentator Jeff Greenfield called “The People’s Choice.” In it he outlines the havoc that takes place when the President-elect dies a few days after the election, and a group of electors decide the replacement is too much of a doofus to deserve their votes.
Actually, it’s not as much of a problem with the presidential elections, because of the electoral college. The real problem, as we’re now seeing in Missouri, is what happens with a senatorial or gubernatorial candidate who dies after it’s too late for a replacement to be selected.
The rules for Congressional candidates are different, in that they call for the seat to remain vacant until a special election can be held.
Kunilou: So I take it that the late Governor’s oppenent is a shoe-in to win the election? Nothing against Gov. Carnahan, but I must imagine that the only people who would still vote for him would be the party diehards. (What party was he with, anyways?)
In the 1996 Governor’s race in Montana, the Democrat candidate Chet Blaylock died of a heart attack about two weeks before the election. I don’t remember what the process was, but the Democratic Party was able to choose his running mate Judy Jacobson to replace him on the ballot.
I don’t remember how/whether they altered the ballots, but all the election results I can find now online show it as a race between Racicot and Jacobsen, instead of Racicot and Blaylock. Maybe Jodi or someone else from Montana remembers better than I do what happened with the ballots.
Recent polls in Missouri have shown that the late Governor Carnahan was leading incumbent Senator Ashcroft, the former a Democrat and the latter a Republican.
The margin was larger when those polled were informed that the late governor’s widow would serve his term.
As my brother in St. Louis has told me, Ashcroft’s campaign sputtered when he halted campaigning for a week and Carnahan received the equivalent of a three-hour infomercial with a lenghty memorial service that was broadcast statewide.
Perhaps people in Missouri are somewhat sentimental. The race was shaping up to be very nasty. Now neither side knows how to campaign. Does Ashcroft attack a grieving widow? Does the grieving widow go out on the hustings and say “vote for the dead guy!”?
BobT is is right. The race in Missouri was a statistical dead heat when the Governor died. It’s still a statistical dead heat (no pun intended.)
Not only is the Senate race tied up in knots, but a large number of Missouri voters can’t even identify the two main candidates for Governor at this point.
(2) In a special, general, or special general election, if, but for the candidate’s vacancy, the vacating candidate would have been elected, a vacancy shall exist in the office for which the race in question was being held, to be filled in the manner provided by law for vacancies in office arising from the failure of an elected official to serve the official’s full term because of death, withdrawal, or removal.
In 1998 Sherman Block, the incumbent Los Angeles (CA) County Sheriff, died shortly before election day (he was running for re-election).
I believe that there is often an official deadline, that varies widely by jurisdiction, after which no changes can be made to the ballots, no matter what. That was the case here.
Had Block won the election, by law the Sheriff would have been appointed by the county’s Board of Supervisors. For a dead guy, he didn’t do too badly, but he wound up losing. I believe he died just before the November run-off, not the June election that precipitated it.