One thing I worry about is a contingent presidential election. That situation arises when no candidate gets a majority of electoral votes (270 of 538). Should this situation arise, Congress gets to pick the next president and vice president.
Yes, you read correctly, the 535 folks whom 80 percent of Americans dislike make these momentous decisions. Yes, these are the same folks who nearly shut down the government, who refuse to fix the broken immigration system and who have run up more than $33 trillion in debt. And who can forget Jan. 6, 2021, when some legislators refused to recognize states’ electoral slates and sparked a riot?
What could go wrong?
My smart readers might now rub their chins and reply, “Well, how likely is that scenario?” Some of them might even point out that there has not been a contingent election since 1824, when John Quincy Adams, Andrew Jackson and Henry Clay split the votes.
True, but the odds of it occurring are growing. Landslide victories (think Ronald Reagan vs. Walter Mondale in 1984 or Richard Nixon vs McGovern in 1972) are growing rarer. Four of the past six presidential elections have been very close. In 2020, had 44,000 voters in Georgia, Arizona and Wisconsin picked Trump instead of Biden we would have had a tied election (269 to 269).
Come the 2024 election, the chances of a contingent election may go higher still, according to a recent report from United to Protect Democracy. The reason is that No Labels, an organization that says its mission is devoted to bipartisan problem-solving, is threatening to run a third-party ticket.
Whether they select Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) or New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu ® or some other heterodox figures to run, you can be sure it will be a serious ticket. Why? Because No Labels is a serious organization. They created the Problem Solvers Caucus in the House, and they are very good at fundraising. Already, the group has secured space for its “unity” ticket on the 2024 ballot in 11 states. And let’s not forget that there is public demand for something other than a Biden-Trump rematch. More than half of voters do not want Biden or Trump.
If No Labels pulls the trigger on this effort, it will be the most real third-party run in decades. For sure, I am sympathetic to their objective. But I am worried about the probability of it failing and the cost thereof.
Which brings me back to a contingent election. It seems highly unlikely that No Labels would outright win 270 electoral votes. There are just too many Americans who cannot imagine voting for anyone other than Trump or Biden. Alabama, Texas, Massachusetts and California — there are plenty of states where their choice for president is going to be whoever is on Team Elephant or Team Donkey.
Thus, the duty falls to Congress, and unfortunately, there is no law that specifies exactly how Congress should carry out its duty. All we have is the 12th Amendment, which has only broad procedural directives. If you thought the January 2021 counting of electoral votes was a trainwreck, you have not seen anything yet.
Legislators would have all sorts of incentives for mischief. A partisan majority in the House could, for example, choose its Speaker, then fail to decide who is the president by Jan. 20, which means the Speaker could become president, per the succession statute. Or, to take another possibility, a determined minority might thwart the House from choosing a Speaker, which leaves it unable to even take up the business of selecting a president.
Meanwhile, the Senate might slow walk its choice of the vice president should it be controlled by the same party as the House. Or if the Senate is led by a different party from the House, the upper chamber might rush through its choice of vice president so that he could ascend to the presidency. (The vice president is second in line and ahead of the Speaker.) Things get even crazier if the Senate president pro tempore decides she wants to be president. While the House dithers she might try to scuttle Senate action on the vice president and get herself elevated to the presidency come Jan. 20.
Whatever the results of the legislative scheming, a huge percentage of voters would feel disenfranchised by the mere fact that legislators did the choosing.
A reader might be mistaken for getting the impression that the authors of the Protect Democracy report would prefer No Labels to pull the plug on its presidential campaign planning. Doing that, however, would not foreclose the possibility of a contingent election.
My own preference is that Congress would take time to pass a statute to clarify the processes that each chamber should use to decide a contingent election. But the time for doing that is running short and the deeper we get into the presidential race the harder it will be to get legislators from both parties to work together.
In April 2020 I warned that the Electoral Count Act was a problem that needed to be fixed. Congress failed to act, and an intruder in a fur hat with a spear in hand sat in the chair of the Speaker of the House. I hope history does not repeat.
You’re missing a key part of that process which makes it even more of a shit show. If there is a contingent election, then it is not resolved by a straight vote of 435 House members. Each state’s House delegation gets a vote. So all 52 members from California get the same voting power as Wyoming’s lone rep.
I thought, surely you must be wrong.
Nope… You’re right.
And they can even hold the vote in a closed session.
wtf
Of course I’m right…
… and don’t call me Shirley.
The one time our votes count for MORE instead of LESS
System is garbage
One time whose votes count more? Wyoming? They already count more in presidential and Senate elections that californians’
Gods save us from the enlightened centrists who somehow perceive both parties as the same.
Even if this pustulant third party managed to win the White House they’d have zero support from either chamber. They’d be completely ineffective at governing.
It’s not about the third party winning, they won’t. It’s about how no majority in the electoral college means that the decision is wrested from the people and throws open the door wide for political shenanigans that are far from democratic.
Think of it like something similar to the spoiler effect if that makes it clearer.
I get what the topic is about: the very undemocratic possibility that our leaders get chosen by fiat and the free-for-all it would prompt. But regardless of the author’s insistence that it isn’t just about third parties, the enlightened centrists are really aggravating the problem by threatening to split the vote.
On top of all that, no one would regard the President as legitimate. Look where we’re at now, 30% of the country literally believes a Presidential election can be faked enough for Trump to have lost.
For at least one of the two parties currently in control… that would be ideal.
State congresses should start trying to push a state led consitutional amendment (under the federal convention method) to reform the college to a ranked choice system where parties put up second choice votes if their candidate fails, proportional electors and a ban on gerrymandering etc.
Should? Yes.
Would? Ha!
Reality? Greed and corruption.
I think 40 states would be on board for a gerrymandering ban for congressional districts, if that gets through it would be a matter of building on that.
I had no idea this was the procedure. I’d love to have more than two viable parties, but I pretty much never want the house to pick the president. What a mess.
Makes sense in a direct vote scenario: the first round is normal, the top 2 enter a duel, and if nobody gets the majority there – that is, too many people pick “abstain” (explicit option on the ballot), the legislative branch could interfere.
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That’s because we have a corporatist with minor socialist tenancies party and a corporatist fascist party.
There’s no national level politician in the USA that’s not pre-approved by the corporate oligarchy.
We even keep score by how much bribe money they raise to predict which oligarchy supported puppet will be in office.
The legislature picking the executive happens after every single election in parliamentary democracies. You don’t see people wetting their pants over it, life goes on.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
My smart readers might now rub their chins and reply, “Well, how likely is that scenario?” Some of them might even point out that there has not been a contingent election since 1824, when John Quincy Adams, Andrew Jackson and Henry Clay split the votes.
Landslide victories (think Ronald Reagan vs. Walter Mondale in 1984 or Richard Nixon vs McGovern in 1972) are growing rarer.
Or, to take another possibility, a determined minority might thwart the House from choosing a Speaker, which leaves it unable to even take up the business of selecting a president.
A reader might be mistaken for getting the impression that the authors of the Protect Democracy report would prefer No Labels to pull the plug on its presidential campaign planning.
My own preference is that Congress would take time to pass a statute to clarify the processes that each chamber should use to decide a contingent election.
Congress failed to act, and an intruder in a fur hat with a spear in hand sat in the chair of the Speaker of the House.
The original article contains 890 words, the summary contains 175 words. Saved 80%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
you say shit show, I say grab some popcorn. It would be one hell of a ride. And whoever schemes thier way in will get very little done because of a lack of support. But if a third party got enough votes it becomes official in some capacity. Then there would be lots of changes. And really change is what we need.
Nah. No meaningful change there can happen without removing fptp.
Not sure what fptp is. But a third official party would change a lot of things.
FPTP: “First Past The Post”, the system of election where the winner is simply the one candidate who receives the most votes even if it’s not a majority (for example if many candidates ran and many received a significant share of the votes). FPTP is simple to carry out, but it’s often criticized for the fact that the winning candidate can be someone whom a majority or even a large majority of the voters didn’t want. The two-party system in America usually obscures that issue in general elections because they turn into, effectively, elections with only two significant choices so the winner tends to have a majority as well as the greatest number of votes. But the problem does show up sometimes in primaries.
FPTP can be contrasted with other systems such as ranked-choice voting and proportional representation.
I listened to a podcadt on ranked choice voting. It seemed pretty good.
Watching your house burn down from the inside might make some hot popcorn.
the problem is Democrats aren’t willing to play the long game on democracy. If there is space for a third party its at the state level and its pushing reforms like proportional voting and constitutional amendments as part of a vision to make the US walk the walk on democracy - to end the shallow lip service talk on democracy.
Nobody has tried the convention method yet for constitutional amendments and it would probably be easy to push something like “states may not gerrymander, and the number of representatives assigned to state and federal legislatures must be proportional to the overall vote for each party.”
It wouldn’t be unlike the birth of the Republican Party in the 19th century and the death of the Whigs.
Yes, these are the same folks who nearly shut down the government, who refuse to fix the broken immigration system and who have run up more than $33 trillion in debt.
It’s really telling that, when it comes time for you cite the issues with Congress, these two things are the most prevalent you can come up with.
Immigration and the debt? That’s your go-to? Those are the two most prominent failures of this Congress in your mind?
I didn’t write the article?
