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Although the latest news continues to point to a hospital stay just in case, Donald Trump has covid-19, a rather unpredictable and more complicated disease in older people. Without wanting to alarm anyone, and certainly by controlling the information that comes out, the protocol says that the White House is already preparing solutions even for the most extreme scenarios.
If an incumbent president, a candidate for reelection, dies or is incapacitated in any way, who is responsible for finding a new candidate, in this case a Republican candidate, are the 168 members of the Republican National Committee, who would have the power to substitute Trump’s name on the ballot papers. They are not bound by internal or federal rules to elevate the vice president to that place, although that is the most logical option.
Amendment 25 says that if a president dies or is seriously injured and cannot lead the destinies of the United States in full possession of his mental faculties, then it is the vice president who assumes the presidency, but in case the president is still a candidate to reelection, and getting sick or dying so close to being (or not) reelected, the rules are less clear.
In the United States, presidents are not directly elected: each state sends a certain number of delegates (assigned roughly in proportion to the number of people living in each state) to the Electoral College, where 538 delegates ultimately vote. in the president. Delegates are representatives of the population and therefore, when the majority of the population of a state votes, for example, on the Democratic candidate, then the envoys of that state must all vote for the Democratic candidate in the Electoral College bulletin. . This was not always the case, and only recently did the Supreme Court legislate to prevent these rebellions.
Then we have a few different scenarios: First, what to do if the candidate dies or cannot function until Election Day, and then what to do if that happens between Election Day and the day delegates have to vote for President. According to most of the constitutional law experts heard by American newspapers (who had already evaluated these scenarios when the pandemic began), in the second hypothesis it is the national committees that choose the name of the new candidate – and that name is printed on the Electoral College bulletin, though it’s not exactly who people voted for, just the color people voted in. But this is the rule. For the first case, this is also the rule: an emergency convention would elect a new candidate where each state would have the same votes it has in any normal convention, but since there is very little time left for the elections, it is no longer possible to include him in the elections. voting ballots. Anything other than Trump because all the deadlines for candidate certification have passed in all states. “The election will most likely take place on the exact same day, with the name of the dead or disabled person in the bulletins,” University of California law professor Rick Hasen told the Washington Post.
The problems do not end there. If the law requires you to vote for a dead person instead of a living person, who is the president? The question arises as to whether or not each state legislature would accept that the delegates sent to the Electoral College vote for someone other than the majority elected by the popular vote. In a normal election, all state delegates (for example, the 55 delegates to which California is entitled) vote for the candidate who was chosen by the majority of the state, but the result will most likely end in the Supreme Court, as it should be discussed whether it is constitutionally acceptable for each state to arrest its delegates to the person who won the popular vote if that person is dead or disabled.
