Usurping the Voters?

[mefoolonhill]

Usurping the Voters

By Peter M. Shane
Monday, July 19, 2004; Page A17

We seem to be devoting a lot of time and energy in this summer of our discontent to thinking about things that could go wrong with the conduct of the November elections. Here's one you probably hadn't thought of.

Suppose that some of the electors -- the people who under our constitutional system conduct the real presidential election some weeks after voters go to the polls -- aren't actually selected by the voters.

Impossible? Not if you give a close reading to the Supreme Court's decision in the case of Bush v. Gore, which finally settled the presidential election of 2000, if not to everyone's satisfaction. Under that decision, there is no guarantee that the electors who are decisive in choosing the next president of the United States will themselves be selected by the people of the United States. That's because the justices ruled in that case that state legislatures have unlimited authority to determine whether citizens in their respective states shall be allowed to vote for president at all.

"The individual citizen has no federal constitutional right to vote for electors for the President of the United States," the court said, "unless and until the state legislature chooses a statewide election as the means to implement its power to appoint members of the Electoral College."

Imagine, now, a state in which the same party controls both houses of the legislature and the governor's office. There would presumably be no partisan impediment to the state legislature, with the governor's approval, deciding that the majority party in state government shall control the state's electoral vote, regardless of any popular vote in the state. If the Supreme Court's declaration is an accurate statement of the law, there would not be any legal impediment either.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A60580-2004Jul18.html
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[AndyTiedye]

1. Now We Need a Plan to Win W/O Florida AND Ohio

We KNOW they would have done it in Florida in 2000 if the Supremes hadn't stepped in,
so we know they will do it in 2004 if the popular vote goes against them.
They have the votes in the legislature to do it and they will if they have to.

If they can do it in Ohio too, that is very bad for us.