No, for voter turnout, we look at the number of people who bothered to get up off their lazy asses and go to the polls.
Taking into consideration Munch’s post (11th in this thread) and Captain Midnight’s post (37th in this thread), you need to also specify the highest percentage of votes you are going to allow for people that are not one of the two main candidates. Otherwise, the theoretical minimum can be very small (Munch came up with a scenario in which 22 votes was enough to elect the president.)
There are so many variables here, that the best answer you can come up would be the answer to “what is the lowest percentage of the popular vote has any winning presidential candidate had in the past?”
Why not 11? One person voting for you in each state while the rest of the state sleeps off their hangovers and doesn’t vote.
You missed my point: I’m not the person whom the House chooses.
I’m postulating a scenario where the House is considering guys who did receive at least 1 electoral vote; the Senate merely chooses me to be VP while the House – well, as it happens, the House winds up busily deadlocked over who should be President, which means I become President on Inauguration Day.
(And if the Senate had likewise deadlocked, then come Inauguration Day it’s the Speaker of the House who’d get sworn in as President despite having received zero votes.)
But the Senate would have to cast votes to install you as VP, either 51 or 34 depending on the discussion above, and you also would have to be one of the top two candidates in Electoral Votes.
Likewise the Speaker of the House got that position by gaining a large number of votes in his/her district to become a member of Congress, and got a majority of votes from Congressmen to be elected speaker.
But nobody cast a vote for me to be President: not a single popular vote or a single electoral vote, not for that job. Sure, you can note that I got 34 or 51 votes to be VP after maybe 1 faithless elector voted to make me VP – but (a) nobody else gave me even one vote for that, and (b) those 35 or 52 votes were solely for whether I should be named VP – which, as it happens, never happens, since I just go straight to being the new President.
(That said, what happens if the Senate deadlocks on who should be the next VP, and the House deadlocks on who should be our next President, and both the House Speaker and the Senate’s Pro Tem Prez are disqualified from succession?)
You missed the point. Voter turnout is the number of people who actually voted divided by the total number of voters. The question is: How do you determine the total number of voters? Apparently in some countries, it’s the number of people legally eligible to vote, whereas in the US, it’s usually taken as the number of registered voters. I suspect that the reason for this in the US is that the election office knows how many are registered but not the other number.
If any of the cabinet members of the outgoing administration have not resigned, the highest on the succession order becomes president. If they’ve all resigned or are not qualified, then we have no president until the deadlock is broken in one of the houses of Congress.
Under this standard, you could take any VP that ascended to the Presidency, since that person only received votes to be VP, not the President.
Yes and no. You can postulate serious imbalances, and sometimes the guy with a few percent less wins the electoral college (maybe with the help of the Supremem Court). But generally, the process works and emphasizes winning, especially in a 3-way race.
From what I’ve heard - The purpose of the electoral college was to prevent what happens in big states - winning a single area with an overbalance of population takes the election, so the lesser areas are impotent. Oddly enough, because of the “2 electors for 2 senators” rule, these exercises above put more power into the hands of smaller states. The concern was that a candidate after Washington would take a few populous areas and the other colonies would be ruled by someone always from Pennsylvania or New York or Virginia, the bigger states.
In fact, one commentary I heard was that unless a person was as popular as Washington, he probably would not get a majority in the electoral college and it would be up to the duly elected house of congress to pick the leader. The framers of the constitution did not forsee the quick rise of country-wide party politics.
Originally the rule was each elector got 2 votes, and the one with most votes was president and second-most votes, vice president. Not long after (Jefferson?) the party discipline was so good that the president and VP on the ticket got equal votes, forcing the tie into the congress who picked the third candidate on the list. Ah, party politics!
In what sense is New York or Illinois “actually conservative” when the liberal populations in the big cities dominate over the conservative rural population? If we go by area of land that’s painted red on the maps, then the whole damn country is “actually conservative”. But acres don’t vote; people do. The fact that NYC dominates upstate New York isn’t a flaw in the system; it’s a straightforward application of democracy.