The election has been certified, and so now it’s official. Donald Trump is the president-elect, and we should all be breathing a sigh of relief. The certification on Monday was much more than an empty formality: it saved the nation from a massive Constitutional crisis that could have made Kamala Harris president of the United States even though she lost the election.
No Democrat chicanery or attempt to keep an “insurrectionist” from taking office would have been necessary: Harris could have become president because of a little-known loophole in election law that could lead to the nullification of hundreds of electoral votes. Trump has now officially won the election, but the loophole is still there, and it’s still dangerous. It needs to be closed.
The issue arises from the question of what happens if a candidate dies after the election but before the official counting of the electoral votes. This has only happened once in history: in 1872, when Democratic candidate Horace Greeley lost in a landslide to Ulysses S. Grant, and then died on Nov. 29, 1872, just over three weeks after the election. Greeley had won 66 electoral votes, but as Tara Ross, author of “Why We Need the Electoral College,” notes in an enlightening essay about this problem, when he died, “his electors didn’t know what to do. They’d made pledges to support Greeley, but did they have to keep that pledge even after his death? In the end, three electors voted for a dead man. The remaining electors split their votes among a variety of Democrats.”
Those other Democrats, Indiana Governor-elect and future Vice President Thomas A. Hendricks, Greeley’s running mate B. Gratz Brown, former Georgia Governor (and “insurrectionist”) Charles J. Jenkins, and the Rubensesque Supreme Court Justice David Davis, had the advantage of being alive. Three Georgia electors, however, apparently calculating that none of the breathing candidates would have been as good a president as a dead man, went ahead and cast their votes for Greeley anyway.
The Civil War was over, and Americans were casting about for something new to fight about. And so even though Grant had won the election decisively, making the whole issue moot, this caused a bit of a kerfuffle. The objection was raised that that Greeley could not be given his three electoral votes as a parting gift, for the simple reason that he “was dead at the time said electors assembled to cast their votes and was not ‘a person’ within the meaning of the Constitution.” The three votes were not counted, and that was that.
Related: They’ve Finally Finished Counting Votes, and Yes, It’s Fishy
Today, however, America is full of raving leftist nutjobs who would like to do nothing more than murder Donald Trump. They’ve already tried twice, and then we just had the Cybertruck explosion outside of the Trump Hotel in Las Vegas, although the president-elect wasn’t anywhere near there at the time. If God in His infinite mercy had not saved us from Trump being killed after the election, as well as after the electors met and cast their votes for Trump, but before the certification on Monday, his 312 electoral votes could have been thrown out on the grounds that Greeley’s three were deep-sixed: that he “was dead at the time said electors assembled to cast their votes and was not ‘a person’ within the meaning of the Constitution.”
Tara Ross explains what could have happened:
If a third attempt on Trump’s life had been successful after the meetings of the electors but before Congress counted the votes, Democrats could have used the Greeley precedent to argue that votes for Trump could not be counted. If that argument succeeded, Trump votes would be thrown out, leaving no candidate with a majority of electors. In that scenario, it falls to the House of Representatives to select a President, but Harris would have been the only eligible candidate because she was the only other person to receive electoral votes.
The losing presidential candidate would end up in the White House.
Clearly, this is a major loophole that needs to be fixed. Ross says that this could be done without a great deal of trouble. “First, the gap between the meetings of the Electoral College and the counting of the votes should be drastically shortened. Second, Congress should pass a resolution, documenting disagreement with the Greeley precedent and committing to count votes for any candidate who was eligible for the presidency on Election Day.” While we’re at it, the nearly three-month gap between the election and the inauguration needs to be shortened as well. The president-elect should take office within a week of the election. The present period gives the sitting president, especially if he is an embittered corruptocrat such as Old Joe Biden, too much time to do damage.
But one thing at a time. We can all be grateful that the certification is behind us. But as crazy as the left is these days, this loophole must be closed.
