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zataomm  4mo ago (text post)   5334 thread views

Colorado Supreme Court Thread

Link to the decision

I don't know to what extent there are established precedents for when a topic is worthy of a mega-thread, but this decision seems like a big deal to me with a lot to discuss, so I'm putting this thread here as a place for discussion. If nobody agrees then I guess they just won't comment.

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What’s supposed to happen if an ineligible candidate wins a state?

Let’s say a write-in candidate wins due to a generational gap. Turns out the last Silents were the only thing holding back fascism, and now Hitler has the plurality in Colorado. What gives?

  • Votes for an ineligible candidate aren’t counted.
  • Votes for an ineligible candidate are counted, but electors are bound to choose the highest eligible count.
  • As above, but electors aren’t bound at all, and can pick Hitler anyway.
  • Electors are bound to pick the highest count, regardless of eligibility, but the US Senate won’t sign and certify votes for ineligible candidates.
  • As above, but the Senate certifies the results; ineligibility only matters after tallying the final result.
  • As above, but the seat gets filled by the VP instead of the Presidential runner-up, since this is “the case of the death or other constitutional disability” from the 12th amendment.

This is a genuine question. Article II doesn’t say anything about faithless or stupid electors, and it certainly doesn’t say anything about the state population picking a dead man. If there’s something in the 14th or in the 12th, I missed it.

Let’s say a write-in candidate wins due to a generational gap. Turns out the last Silents were the only thing holding back fascism, and now Hitler has the plurality in Colorado.

That can’t happen. Colorado won’t count unapproved write-ins. You can write ‘Mickey mouse’ on the ballot, it’s just an abstention.

Seems kind of ill-advised that they're calling attention to the system being, "you can vote for whoever you want, as long as they're one of the state-approved choices". Then again, everything about this seems ill-advised, but here we are.

Eh. Oklahoma IIRC doesn't allow write-ins at all, and comes damned close to not allowing third-party candidates either -- last time I looked, the requirement was that they had to gather petitions with signatures of 3% of the voting population to get on the ballot. (I recall an old SSC open thread where someone from Romania was complaining about how strict the election laws were there, where it took signatures from 1% of the voting population to get a new party on the ballot. When even ex-Commie-Block countries have more liberal election laws than your state does, that says something.)

Personally, if I was in charge, I wouldn't allow write-ins either (having preprinted ballots that can be scanned by machine is a good thing), but I wouldn't have any requirement other than "the candidate meets whatever eligibility standards (min. age etc) are set for the office and pays a fee to cover the share of costs printing the ballots attributable to adding his entry."

(having preprinted ballots that can be scanned by machine is a good thing)

I'm a big fan of hand-counting paper ballots, personally. Election counts are an absolute petri dish for conspiracy theories, so the more analog and impossible-to-even-theoretically-game the system is, the better.

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