As brought up here and here. Anyway:
- A group of very smart, very skilled men went to some time and trouble to create a system that hates political parties in the first place. That’s why we only have two of them in the first place.
- To win Electoral Votes, you need to win states. All but two are winner-take-all; and if any of them have 50%+1 runoff rules for Presidential elections it’s news to me.
- If you get enough votes to throw the election into the House then keep in mind that the Twelfth Amendment dictates that each state votes for one of the top three vote-getters, and they do so as individual states: thus, you can get 219 House members to vote for your candidate and still lose easily. What has to happen is that you need to win the count in 26 of the state Congressional delegations.
- After November of this year, chances are very good that the GOP will be in the majority of more than 26 state Congressional delegations.
- Even if a third party sweeps a bunch of incumbents out in 2012, said third party Congressmen-elect will not be seated in time to affect a hypothetical House vote.
- The Senate does much the same thing for the Vice President, except that it’s a majority vote from the top two vote-getters and there’s got to be a majority vote.
- Conclusion: depending on how November shakes out, a hypothetical 2012 election sent to the House will quite possibly result in the Republican candidate being declared the winner. Remember: in 1824 (the only time that this scenario has happened) the second-place candidate became President. People who complain will thus be told to do what Andrew Jackson did: go back out and win a majority of the Electoral Vote in the next election.
- Secondary conclusion: you could conceivably end up with a scenario where the President’s a Republican who came in third, the Vice President’s a Democrat who came in second – and a Congress dominated by a third-party.
- Tertiary conclusion: just swarm the Republican party on the local level, take it over, and keep it on the straight and narrow, fiscally speaking. Much simpler all around.
Moe Lane