Friday, March 29, 2024

How Giant Meteor of Death Can Become President

giant-meteor
Giant Meteor of Death

Are you dreading the overwhelming probability that either Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump will become president?

Here’s a long-shot scenario to raise your spirits. Many of us are big supporters of the Giant Meteor of Death, a candidate who has promised to destroy ISIS, eliminate America’s national debt, and make a real “impact” on Washington, D.C. He is the change candidate we have all been waiting for — for millions of years!

Giant Meteor’s historic candidacy has hit a major road block, however. The Death campaign has struggled with ballot access, and Giant Meteor is currently relegated to being a write-in candidate in all 50 states. The odds of a write-in candidate winning a state, even a groundbreaking candidate like Giant Meteor, are pretty much zero.

So how can he — or she, Giant Meteor has not, as of this writing, outlined a policy on preferred pronouns — win the presidency?

First, neither Donald Trump nor Hillary Clinton can get to 270 votes. Jon Schweppe wrote about two possible no-win scenarios last week. Here’s another possibility. What if Trump wins Maine, which recent polling has shown is a toss-up, and forces a 269-269 tie?

Map via 270towin.com
Map via 270towin.com

 

So we have the perfect tie scenario. What happens then? The Constitution dictates that the newly elected House of Representatives would then decide the president by giving each state delegation one vote. The top three candidates who received electoral votes would be eligible in this run-off. In a 269-269 scenario, that would be limited to Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton.

But what if a faithless elector picked Giant Meteor of Death? This could easily happen. According to FairVote.org, there have been 157 faithless electors who either abstained or voted for a different candidate since the adoption of the electoral college. These are the votes that matter on Election Day, not the popular vote. So what if a faithless elector voted for Giant Meteor of Death?

Let’s say a District of Columbia elector, who was supposed to vote for Hillary Clinton, instead embraced Death? Then the final electoral vote count would be Trump 269, Clinton 268, and Death 1. Giant Meteor of Death would be eligible in the runoff!

If the state delegations decided that an extinction level event was a better fate than President Trump or President Clinton, then Giant Meteor of Death would become President of the United States and bring change (and a whole lot more!) to America.

Sidenote: The Constitution gives the newly elected US Senate the ability to choose the vice president. If the Democrats take over the Senate, as many are projecting, then Tim Kaine, assuming he survives the impact (and decades of nuclear winter), would be next in line to become president.

Frank Cannon is the president of American Principles Project.

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